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Hairnet

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Everything posted by Hairnet

  1. Well, building the city wasn't Altruistic. No one wants to live in a submarine all alone, that is crazy. He wanted to create a functioning society after the horrors of the early twentieth century showed him that modern governments were not to be trusted (very true). I think you are correct though. The problem with the game is that it attempts to satire/deconstruct Objectivism at the same time as creating a first person shooter. The whole city was designed as a first person shooter map, which doesn't make any sense from a world building perspective. Really this is a good example of disharmony between story telling and game design. I think an RPG or a stealth game would better fit a story about a dystopia (see Dishonored). A good example of story telling and game design harmony would be Metro 2033 or Half Life. The themes of those games are extremely compatible with first person shooter mechanics and tropes. If you play the newest game you will see a complete breakdown in storytelling ability (but superb game design). The game's premise uses really bad 1990s science fiction premises that do not make any sense.
  2. I appreciate that Harrison. What worries me is this prevailing trend on the internet. Some people attempt to make real arguments while at the very same time insulting and abusing their opponent. The perpetrators of this tactic essentially make it extremely difficult to discuss any issues that they have raised. This means that by the end of the discussion, the issue has become so confused and everyone has become so exhausted that no one wishes to discuss the issue anymore. This allows the perpetrator to feel as though he or she has gotten the last word. I find the whole of it to be dehumanizing. It mutates discussion into pointless debate and conflicts of personality. I don't speak to people on the internet so that I can be abused or so that I can get into unproductive arguments that devolve pissing matches.
  3. Seriously??? I don't know what personality disorders you two have in the real world, but please think about the fact that there is actually another person on the other side of the computer. @Dannekjold Your are being hyperbolic and hysterical (not funny). @Red Wanderer Why couldn't you have just posted a thread about Rand's epistemology? No one wants to talk to someone who accuses them of being evasive cultists (you haven't met any of us or talked to us about anything ever) . If you are going to talk to people like they are the stupidest people they ever met (without any justification either), you are going to be ignored. You could easily just write those posts without throwing in all of the spiteful non-sense. I would love to see more discussion of this issue, as I know very little about epistemology.
  4. Ouch! The run on sentences! I am not really picky about grammar or spelling, but could you take the time to rewrite your post?
  5. He is saying that you still need to have good judgment regardless of how rich you are.
  6. There isn't any reason to be hostile. Its seems as though you think that Karl Popper's ideas on epistemology are correct. Why don't you start a new thread explaining your position? Since you have such a fundamental disagreement with others here, there isn't really and point in discussing whether or not santa exists until the other issues have been discussed.
  7. When I realized that the Christian god was evil, I decided that Christians couldn't know anything about a God and I became a deist (for like three months). Then I looked into Objectivism. Anton LaVey's satanism combines some very superficial themes from Netzsche and Rand with a focus on secular ritual and occultism. It was a bad idea and I think it was poorly executed. The other satanists get worse from their, diving into a serious belief in magic and conspiracy theories.
  8. This frontline documentary explains what Obama had to do to get his healthcare bill passed.
  9. The two judges thing doesn't seem realistic. To get anything done in society you would have to subscribe to one of these agencies before hand. Someone who doesn't subscribe to any laws would not be hired at a job, let into school, or allowed to have a bank account. So there wouldn't be two judges. There would be a single judge that their two agencies agreed was fair. On punishment - A voluntarist society would most likely avoid the death penalty for all but the worst crimes. A man taking it upon himself to kill someone better have an extremely large amount of proof that he can show to the community, otherwise he may end up on trial for murder. If someone looses a case, their company has to pay for their damages. This makes them a liability to their company. If a criminal wants to get on good terms with his company, he will need to live under conditions of their choosing. Thus the jail sentence would essentially send them to a place where they can work off their debts in peace and away from society. If they refuse to go to jail, they will become an outlaw, with no way of surviving.
  10. The democrats basically let the insurance industry bribe its way into a civil service position.
  11. They don't have much of an incentive to stray away from undefined protracted wars. It makes a lot of money for some people. On a somewhat related note...
  12. I do not think a artificially sentient being would emerge from a computer. It would have no means of accessing the real world and would be wholly reliant on second hand information input by humans. Now a machine with a bunch of sensors that was designed to learn about the world could become sentient (more like an animal at first).
  13. Can we change? “The appeal of using markets to put a price on public values, is that there’s no judgment on the preferences they satisfy.” Debate is unnecessary. Markets don’t “ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex, or a kidney ... the only question the economist asks is ‘How much?’ Markets ... don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and unworthy ones.” Markets may never draw the line, but do politicians, in secret? What is certain: Capitalism is eliminating moral values, as Nobel economist Milton Friedman and capitalism’s philosopher Ayn Rand had been preaching to the generation. As Sandel puts it: “Each party to a deal decides for him- or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged. This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. This is so pathetic. Mises tore this to pieces in the early twentieth century, and Hume and Menger in the early twentieth century. Until these people can get around the is-ough dichotomy, they are full of shit.
  14. Also banning knowledge is an extremely difficult thing to do without it spreading to other forms of knowledge. Bomb making is largely understanding chemistry and some mechanics. Even if you ban explicit instructions, anyone who understands some chemistry can figure it out with some effort. The law will either be pointless or it will end up mutating into a large set of rules regulating who can study science and technology. That is dystopia territory right there. http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Adeptus_Mechanicus#.UX4Hr29BmSo
  15. The difference between the two is mostly rhetorical in nature. The term is mostly an attempt to distance the movement away from those who support free markets and capitalism in name only while supporting government controls that benefit the wealthy. Market Anarchism could refer to the more obscure types of Anarchism proposed in the 19th century by guys like Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. While supporting Markets, they had problems with certain legal ideas that were associated with property in the 19th century. Even Proudhon can be considered a Market Anarchist because his ideas of property bordered on socialist, but he still supported voluntarism and a free market economy. In the end, the term "Anarcho-Capitalism" was coined by Rothbard, and I am pretty sure even he thought it was a mistake. He took the two words that scare everyone and put them together to name his political philosophy.
  16. The only thing Adam should do is talk to Bob after the insurance guy leaves and ask him if everything is okay. If he thinks something is up he should call whatever neo-feudal lord he swore an oath to and let his professionals take care of it. This isn't even a criticism of "Anarchism", but of a society in which everyone is Rorschach. Even then, a vigilante would be more intelligent about this.
  17. How you approach a discussion is important, I have found this to be difficult because you threw a bunch of complicated questions out there without sharing anything about how you thought about those issues. We can't really help you understand our positions unless we understand yours first. This "Answer me and I will be the Judge" format isn't really equitable and anyone could do it to any group of people and it would be frustrating. I could easily go on a forum about something non-philisophical and do the exact same thing. I would just be ignored as a troll. So can you just take the attribute question and discuss just that. Maybe you should make a new thread. Please explain what you mean in the fullest detail.
  18. Those attribute are only the same in the sense that they have similar phenomena that produce them. That is, their identity at some level is similar enough that both traits exist in different entities. However without that identity the trait wouldn't exist in either. Blue doesn't exist separately from any entity and you can't find an example of it doing so. Lava as a liquid and lava as hot just describes two aspects of the same thing. Lava is hot because its atoms are moving at a higher rate than our body temp. Lava is liquid because lava is hot. When we understand these attributes and how they relate to one another, it allows us to have a guess about how other entities functions. The relationship between phase and temperatures however only make sense when you are talking about entities.though.
  19. If I had a soap box to stand on, i would probably suggest that while everyone intention in helping is admirable, they need to be careful and follow emergency procedures when an emergency happens. This is why we have fire drills in school. However the problem is that there isn't much of a procedure for bombings, or what do during a terrorist attack. I know what to do during a tornado because I live in Oklahoma, I bet Israel is the only country that gets bombed so consistently that is people know to look out for secondary explosives. @2046 Well if they said anything else they would never here the end of it. Some people demand that you genuflect to the various sacred cows before saying anything important. Just look at how people talk about teachers in this country right before they talk about the education system.
  20. I think Turkey contains a lot of Muslims who are not interested in theocracy. Their leadership at the very least is interested in joining the European Union, and thus integrating with Europe economically and legally. I don't hate muslims. I hate medievalists and anyone who would try to drag me down to that kind of barbarism. Islamic culture is just unique in that it has so much of that left in them. The rest of the medieval cultures got overturned by imperialism and statism.
  21. The extreme subjectivists in the movement even provided reasons for why they support "liberty" (Benjamin Tucker comes to mind).
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