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Hairnet

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Everything posted by Hairnet

  1. The trouble is with the word "created". Rocks weren't created, they just are, and before they were something else. Creation means something specific. It is a work, a process of reason and selection. It exists to fulfill a rational end. If a being was truly all-powerful, eternal and omnipresent, it would have no reason to create, because without the alternative of life and death, value would be meaningless to it. Why does something so powerful and so durable need a mind or values or preferences on what primates do with their genitals? There would be no force of evolution that could force it to develop or evolve. An eternal all powerful entity would be a terrifying force, not a sentient being.
  2. Well first of all the term "black" doesn't just refer to a skin color. It refers to a variety of people who are descended from African slaves in the united states. . I am not referring to people with a dark brown hue. I mentioned the negative culture in my first paragraph. Iopulist leaders view their people as pawns to be thrown away for the cause of a collective, they don't care about the rights or prosperity of their community. The reason why I say that they are victims is that blacks have terrible leadership that beyond the norm. At least with mainstream leadership you have secular progressives and right-wing Christians. However many of the "Black Leaders" that are invited to talk about issues by the mainstream media operate on the premises of Marxism, Nationalism, and Christianity. The leaders who operate on these premises are guilty of using their time and resources to lead people further down into dependence, racism, and religion. This is all done to create not a group of individuals, but a needy collective that can be accessed as a voting block by politicians. This is very convenient for the democratic party. The policies that are implemented by that very party then turn to reinforce with violence the negative aspects of that group. It seems populist programs are catered specifically towards blacks, by black populist groups, and the democratic party as a whole. The government comes in at the point where political favoritism and coalition building lead to an even more disadvantageous situation for those who are under the sway of that leadership. The evils of "Black Leaders" need to be pointed out. EDIT: So basically I am arguing that culture is top down, and that means politics can have just as much an effect on culture than the other way around. To support this argument I would offer the following CATO discussion on public opinion in foreign policy. In the linked panel they talk about how majorities are socially constructed by establishment leaders and elites to shape public opinion. http://www.cato.org/events/public-opinion-us-foreign-policy-what-it-how-does-it-matter
  3. It really doesn't help that guys like Jesse Jackson and Sharpton are scoundrels who have no interest in protecting the rights of their constituents, yet they are chosen by our media to represent minorities in these issues. I head Jackson today and he was advocating the idea that the Zimmerman trial was done incorrectly because there were no blacks on the jury. I am inferring that he would prefer that juries be constructed along racial classification. Absurd. I hope that minorities who feel cheated by our system notice that we do have minority leadership in this country, some of those leaders are very powerful. They need to notice that the problems are rooted in legislation that allows for prejudicial enforcement and policies that destroy communities. What all oppressed people need to understand that movements that don't treat them as individuals but as a collective will never give them liberty or prosperity. Racism still exists in this country, but I don't think its a "social problem" anymore. The problem is that the culture of illiegality and welfarism has created a dysfunctional minority subculture that produces more. Walter Block is a libertarian thinker who has looked a lot into how welfare and the drug war have harmed blacks. Its really insidious once you realize what the government is doing to these people.
  4. Damn.. I only had seen Nyquist talk in a debate about his ideas. Even then he relied on appeals to authority (tradition and intuition mostly).
  5. I believe in an organized government. However both you and Diana Hsieh have both asserted this and I don't think that this is true. We actually have a place were absolute communist dictatorship has collapsed in a stateless society. According to this argument, Islamic/Tribal Feudalism is better than totalitarian communism.
  6. If you look at the "New Atheist" authors and see how smug they are it isn't uprising that so many people who are influenced by them are similar. As far as rap music goes, its just as mixed as any other genre in terms of quality. My favorite rapper right now is Kendrick Lamar. The whole album "Good Kid M,A,A,D City" is pretty good, it is a concept album about his experience of his brother was murdered and fighting the urge to kill the guy who did it. (He didn't... he became a famous rapper instead).
  7. So you are afraid of blackmail and expanding the power of a government that has so much legislation. That seems to be a good explanation. Well I don't think information gathering has to rely on force. Not necessarily. It wouldn't be hard for a member of the NSA to convince a company to go along with a plan. Large companies support the government voluntarily all the time. We have the freest press in the world for example and most of it will bend its knees to power just to maintain a good relationship with it. I have serious doubts about the "Right to Privacy" and was wondering if that was what people were basing their arguments off of. Fear of corruption was something that came to mind immediately when I saw this story, but the rights violations were minor compared to the vast majority of activity performed by "The United States". How this is was on the news all the time and the drug war disaster isn't is hard to explain.
  8. That isn't its logical conclusion. No one is even close to compelling people to replace their walls for glass, that would violate someone's property rights. On the other hand the government could get businesses to work with it to collect information voluntarily. If a neighborhood has a huge crime problem, and a local police force thinks that it can better protect people's rights by setting up camera's everywhere they can get permission to put them, would that be wrong?
  9. Islam needs to be defined here, because the politics of the middle east and Islamic worlds (different things) are a lot more complicated. I think its true that West Asia and the Islamic world are places filled with people who have very little love or understanding for America and more importantly classical liberal values. A lot of them hate Russia, China, Israel, the EU, and India just as much as the US. Thir part of the world is the one being left behind. I can also see the charge that the government has very irresponsible people controlling it. However I don't think there is a "Muslim Nation" that agrees on any one thing. There really isn't a single true Caliphate that everyone recognizes anymore. The religion is divided, and even then the politics of the Islamic world and West Asia are even more divided. The middle east also has a heavy secularist-nationalist tendency that takes inspiration from Hitler and the like. As an example, Saddam Hussein was secular and his political party was a militant break off from a left-wing nationalist group. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Caliphate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba%27ath_Party Turkish leadership on the other hand wants their nation to be part of the European Union, while I don't really approve of that it shows a friendliness to western ideas in a major Islamic nation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Turkey_to_the_European_Union#Timeline Whereas Bin Laden created an organization that fairly small but inspired similar organization throughout the Islamic world to take up arms and fight along side one another. The following link talks about how decentralized Al-Qaeda is and how it isn't really a single organization but more of a strategy that can easily be adopted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Qaida#Command_structure
  10. Conspiracies like that can only exist because of the very transparent power structures that people have created and support. I bet people conspire all the time to get advantages over others.,Adam Smith talked about this in the 18th century. A good example of a conspiracy is organized crime. A lot of times when bills get passed they are based on conspiracies to give an industry or interest group what it wants above the interests of "the people". Its a mistake though to think that these conspiracies are special or important to examine in anyway. they often rest on the excessive power of the state. As an example I find the following video to be pretty sober compared to most conspiracy theories. It actually attempts to use testimony. Even this video concludes though that the actual conspiracy is powerless without the power granted to the government.
  11. I don't think that is a fair description of rap music at all. Just because you don't like the sounds doesn't mean it is not music.
  12. Sure, but we are talking about a personality disorder oriented around those things.
  13. Well various characters in The Fountainhead put the opinions of others, status symbols, the ability to have authority others as primary goals rather than the results of actual creativity and productivity. Peter Keeting is a conformist who cares to much about prestige, and many of his friend could easily be accused of vanity. . Gail Wynand seeks power even though what he is doing is just a dishonest kind of conformity.
  14. I mentioned the Fountainhead as my source for this. You never defined in what sense you were using those terms.
  15. Well power, prestige, and vanity are all rejected by Objectivism. Its a major theme of the Fountainhead. Objectivism is often accused of being an excuse for narcissistic upper-class white people to do whatever they want, but The Fountainhead talks about why those types of people incur a lot of suffering on themselves and why it is not good to be like that.
  16. Your post didn't have a central argument you just raised a whole bunch of objections in a poorly organized wall of text. What I got out of this thread is that the individual is the fundamental political unit. The government, the real government that actually gets things done correctly, is the group of people organize themselves and follow the rules required to protect the individual rights of others. I want the same rules regardless of geography.
  17. You should have bothered to read this very thread or the gallons of articles on these topics. Really do some research instead of acting like this is the first time these objections have been raised. Here are some articles written on these issues by Roderick Long. These would be a good place to start if you are looking for responses to your questions. http://www.freenation.org/a/f22l3.html (on defense) http://c4ss.org/content/12581 (on objective law)
  18. I have always found that the Objectivist ethics are profound because they view man correctly, as a rational actors moving in the face of an uncertain future. The factor of time is rarely mentioned in typical ethical conversations. Neither is the fact that men and women must make decisions while considering not just their current intent, but any other possible values or desires they have. Acting as though the only requirement for an action to be rational be that the intent be satisfied by the action leads people to an absurdly short sighted world view, or one where ethics are not based in rationality. Ignoring uncertainty and time leads to an ethics that uses hindsight as though it were foresight.
  19. You should never stop asking those questions about people. No. No.
  20. Now that is interesting. Just because people do not meet those standards, that does not mean that I do not communicate with them. I friendly with most people I know and I even spend time with people who I am not sure about. Those people are valuable for the time they spend with me, but they don't get the full benefits of my friendship either. It sounds like you need to learn to create proper boundaries for different kinds of people. Claire, if you want to be a part of the conversation please pay attention to what others are saying. I never said a thing about surety and none of what I said contradicts the idea that long relationships or communication skills are an important part of trust.
  21. You have to audit people. Take account of how much they have actually benefited you compared to how much they have cost you. Someone can't take advantage of you if you keep track of what they should be providing in a relationship. This means understanding what different values are required to have a relationships. Do they admit when they are wrong? How do they make amends? Do they ever anticipate your desires and fulfill them? How do they communicate their grievances with you? Do they express disagreements they have with you? Do they express their desires? When you tell them secrets do they tell you secrets? What kind of situations do they prefer to be around you? How much do they know about you compared to what you know about them? Do they acknowledge when their stories seem unlikely? Have they ever admitted to a mistake when they did not have to? When you do things together how do they behave? Are they cooperative and interested? I can't consider someone my friend until I have answers to all of these questions (and a few more).
  22. Thanks for keeping this thread running.
  23. Wouldn't a sex offender have an injunction against him stating that he or she would not be allowed around kids, rather than a law prohibiting his or her employment in one industry or another?
  24. This isn't unusual for you or anyone else who has a set of ideas they value. No one likes being told that everything they believe is wrong, and everyone's ideas are ridiculed by someone. Ridicule is an act, a piece of drama, used to manipulate those with these kind of insecurities. No one wants to be stupid, gullible, or evil. So the person who engages in the ridicule will convince themselves of having knowledge, and then proceed to act as though your ideas contradict what they know to be true in such an obvious way that it would produce amusement. These people are really motivated by the fact that they themselves know very little about the either the ideas they are ridiculing or the ideas they are defending. The only fact is that Ayn Rand threatens their system and ethical beliefs and they can't have that. So, not matter if it is true, they must convince others that Ayn Rand was a drug addicted, serial killer loving, cheating, cult leader who hates poor people but loves social security checks and whose main followers are insecure and pretentious teenagers. In reality this is the exacts same kind of hate and ignorance that conservatives have for conservatives have developed for Karl Marx or Mohammed. They don't know anything about the ideas but they are so threatened by them that they must find the easiest way to dismiss them. No matter how hysterical, hyperbolic, unfair, hypocritical, irrelevant, or just untrue the attacks are. In the end, it isn't your responsibility to defend a set of beliefs that you haven't verified independently. That tendency is what creates the dreaded "Randroids". Ayn Rand has some really good ideas, but reading her books isn't enough, you need to understand them through your own personal efforts. In the end you may not agree with the whole of the philosophy, but I would rather have people who disagreed who knew what they were talking about rather than people who did agree and did not know what they talked about.
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