Boydstun

Target for picking a not-Trump candidate for backing by Koch Network is in time for Iowa Caucus next January. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-conservative-group-led-by-billionaire-koch-set-spend-beat-trump-2023-06-29/

Eiuol, Your post reminded me of an episode that occurred in Rand's life in the fall of 1940. Except for the link and the square-bracketed text I added, the following is from Barbara Branden's biographical essay "Who Is Ayn Rand?" (1962), based on interviews of Rand by Mrs. Branden.

Tad, I probably should have put those two recent developments into two different posts. So far as I know, this candidate is of no particular interest to the Koch group. Also, that interview of him, which allowed him a lot of time to speak, did not contain much of substance. Since he was in the House for three terms, I expect his voting record would say more about what could be expected from him in policy. I don't care for candidates who do not promote making their first budget a balanced one. Though, from what I've seen, such a candidate would attract no interest at all from Republican primary voters (attention on culture wars). Such a Republican nominee might however win in the general election against a big spending Democrat, and like the Democrat, would have the attraction that he or she was not Donald Trump. My Democrat friends favor Trump for the Republican nomination, because they expect they can beat him again by an even wider margin. If the nominee is not Trump, they are not sure they can win. Why did you say this new contestant is a racist?

HM, good point.

Doug, I take TS to be not endorsing such a silly view but to be drawing it as an implication of writings of Rand. This he or she does by putting a purely intellectual sense to Rand's use of the word "recognition," ignoring recognitions implicit in behavior (and with no insinuation that the implicit recognition is something that could be made explicit in the mind of the agent), indeed ignoring the behavior context of these remarks on rights. It is not a square reading of Rand, only a stretching. That is too bad. There are serious criticisms of Rand's theory of rights that have been made and are very worthwhile to judge and perhaps defend Rand or offer improvements on Rand. On a more serious point, I'd like to dispute the whole idea that anyone loses rights by violating them. That error is by not knowing how the relation rights is constituted by a complex of interpersonal oughts* which so far as I've seen almost no one understands. (I realized the exact constitution sometime in the late 1960's; it is in that link.) Strictly speaking, it is liberties and powers that are restricted when a criminal is penalized.

The Koch Network has raised 70 million dollars to place in the Republican presidential primary contest for some candidate or other not Trump. New Candidate in the Contest

Thank you. Save one, all of those ideas of Rand's are at least partly false. One statement is true. It is made by you, and it is claimed (correctly) for Rand: only human beings have rights (because if authentic, they are moral relationships possible only between autonomous agents). I'd not take "recognize" as so intellectual and so explicitly articulated as you do here in reading Rand using "recognize" in these right-action contexts. When Rand has passengers on a train killed through wrong conduct of train operators causing an accident, poetic justice is in play, not advocacy of the death penalty for people holding the mistaken views displayed in the minds of those passengers. The chorus of uncharitable readings of this scene notwithstanding (e.g., agree with Rand's philosophy or be sent to the gas chamber by those who do.) I'd like to reiterate what I said upstream: The people participating at this site have shown themselves to be independent thinkers, paramount for them is what is true and right, and they do not determine the answer by trying to figure out what Rand said on the issue. There are Objectivist-types like that (holding to a "hockshop of authority" contra Rand's counsel; I've encountered a few on Facebook), but they do not write here, at least not in the years I've been here. (I'm not an Objectivist, meaning there is at least one essential of the philosophy I think false, but like most others here, I have intellectual and personal-survival debt to Rand, interest in philosophy, including hers, and significant agreement with her on some issues significant to me.) The audience Rand indicates she thinks she is addressing in the Galt's Speech of Atlas Shrugged are not fully in agreement with her philosophy therein, because she is the inventor of it and is breaking the news of it. She repeatedly assumes all sorts of good and bad things in the audience of the radio speech, and she holds forth people's wrong bases for those things or only glimpsed correct bases for them, which she tries to diagnose and remedy out in the light. They do not have her philosophy, yet "whatever living moments you have known, were lived by the values of my code." They have and do authentic good without knowing her code. Rand did not take issue with the act requirement for use of lawful government force. Had she known the specific history behind the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from the Southeastern United States in the 1830's to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), she might have faced up to the complications of such historical developments. Certainly, she should have. And she should have learned more about those land-takings before describing the historical facts behind the takings in the American history more generally. That was a crucial taking and removal of population I knew of from childhood and schooling out there, and I've been amazed how often people growing up in the Northeast don't know a blessed thing about it.* *

Evidence of Gravitational-Wave Cosmic Background Wider and More Understandable Report

TS, Exactly where did Rand write or even voice the idea that people who do not recognize individual rights have no rights themselves? I don't recall such a thing. Additionally: What Rand thought follows from the essentials of her philosophy does not relieve one from the responsibility of thinking out for oneself what follows from the essentials of her philosophy and how so. And it does not relieve one from the intellectual responsibility of independently assessing whether the consequent is true and right, which is a perfectly good thing to discourse on here. If one is not acting in immediate self-defense or invoking subsequent action by the law for retribution against someone who has actually initiated force against one, then using force (through law or otherwise) by way of preemption is itself an initiation of force. That was Rand's view and it is widely shared wisdom won by long bloody history. You guys let T.S. Elliot immigrate to your country. Freud also. Eliot turned RC. Might he have been fixing to help the Irish Republican Army? Might a Jewish guy like Freud join a communist cell bent on violent overthrow the government and its protection of the institution of private property in your country? Casting immigrants into your country as threats to keeping you free of force can become very irrational. Such would be not only the two farcical fancies I just mentioned. Blanket casting of people from certain countries or of certain religions as such threats is also irrational and unjust. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “What is your attitude toward immigration? Doesn’t open immigration have a negative effect on a country’s standard of living?” This is Rand's answer to that one (1974):

The Underground Railroad Today Some of my Republican acquaintances rationalize their continued voting for candidates who are anti-abortionists by claiming that because of this new underground railroad, pregnant women throughout America still have the legal power to procure an elective abortion throughout the first trimester. I'd think, rather, the possibility of assisted escape from a slave state to a free state did not mean that voting for defenders of the institution of slavery was not participation in evil. That is to say, it should not be done. One should vote against any anti-abortionist (unless they are pitted against a champion of compulsory national service such as reactivation of the military draft, which is the same issue at stake in the proscription of elective abortions) or at least not vote for them. If one has voted for anti-abortionist Senators or Presidents in the past and one acknowledges the injustice of the new proscriptions of abortion in America following on Dobbs, perhaps a drop of forgiveness is due one who has reformed their voting choices and another drop if additionally one contributes to the new underground railroad.

I'd think we should leave people alone unless they violate rights in their actions, such as in force or fraud. We wouldn't want to refuse entry and staying here to just everyone who will not acknowledge individual rights in their ideology. There are libertarians who support liberty by various versions of utilitarianism, and they argue against there being such a thing as individual rights, although, in practice they respect such rights. We used to have people wishing to immigrate into the US wait on Ellis Island until they had a sponsor to enter the US. Maybe it is still like that. I don't know, but that would be all right with me. My husband's grandmother was like that. She had come over by herself from Germany. She was able to get off the island when a Jewish lady in New York came down and picked her to become her cleaning lady.* I have an old joke for you. A little old woman on Ellis Island was asked by the official "Do you support the overthrow of the US government by force or violence?" She thought a bit, and she replied "force." Welcome to Objectivism Online.

How would one know who is a potential migrant? When Rand's sister visited Rand on the USA in the '70's, Rand thought of her sister as a potential migrant, but her sister did not. Isn't it better to have an oath acknowledging that the specific fundamental law of the US is the US Constitution with the individual rights protected therein and in context of the other parts of this law of laws? "Principles of a free society" is too vague. What would you say to a complete unification of the USA and Mexico? The southern border would be easier to monitor. When East Germany was united to West Germany, it was the law and economic system of the West that prevailed; likewise, law of the US could become the reformed law of Mexico. Greater peace and prosperity might come to the Mexico part of the US, compared to today, especially if we repealed the prohibition of drugs to adults. The migration and trade could be just like between Texas and Oklahoma. Do you think citizens who support individual rights, but do not mean by that individual property rights, should be deported? (If we deport enough people to Canada, I hope they don't retaliate by getting the flow of maple syrup to us cut off.) I don't think so. As long as civil liberties, such as communications free of government suppression, especially criticisms of the government and its officials, continues; the free and creative mind continues, and at least de facto recognition of property rights has a very good chance.

Yes. Those are the ones among Republicans I was thinking of, whose capture of the White House and Congress Putin can hope for. Among Republican Voters Recently GOP Lawmakers in Dissent

Since the preceding post by Alex, Putin and Prigozhin reached an agreement, avoiding armed conflict among the Russian mercenary group and the regular Russian troops. I see this as a victory for Putin in his Ukraine quest. Those mercenary troops, as well as the Chechen mercenary troops, are now returned to Ukraine to continue Putin's aggression and hegemony. Prigozhin in exile in Belarus is surely a dead man walking, although Putin may leave him alive until he has secured unity of the Wagner troops with the regular Russian troops, all under regular Russian military command. I still think Putin will not enter negotiations bringing peace to Ukraine until after the US elections of 2024, hoping for Republican wins that might cut US Military aid to Ukraine and bring him advances in the war for bargaining position or perhaps victory.

Click on page 15 of the PDF for Benevolence versus Altruism. July 1962 of The Objectivist Newsletter, page 27.

Emotions (and actions) are based on values. In the case of these emotions, if they are based on the value to individuals in the preservation of the human species, then that is a more distant basis of the emotion. Closer value-basis of the emotion, I'd say, would be the likeness-valuation that Branden wrote about in that essay. Then too, these human emotions towards human infants could have likeness-valuation causes mediating value-of-potential-for-rationality causes. (Cf. structuring causes and triggering cause in the case of gravitropic root growth, pp, 188–90.) By the way, I notice that if self-likeness and species continuation and potential for rationality in others are taken as solid nature-values given to individuals in the course of early brain development and interaction with the world and other persons, then value of self to itself is not the sole operator among biocentric values, which is to say that pure ethical egoism is false. I should mention, however, that if rationality in others is an inalienable part of one's own rational self, this need not stand as a confounding situation for egoism, but a radical renovation in the conception of what is one's rational self (leaving in place, I should say, Rand's idea that one's self is one's mind.) I don't think valuation of species continuation stands in such a unity with valuation of the self by the self. And I should mention that the circumstance that such valuation of distant matters must be carried home by valuation in self-likeness does not transform the valuation of the distant circumstance into a valuation of self by that self; that is, there no turning the valuation into an egoistic one by that conveyance factor.

Is that the ONLY basis? What about the self-likeness basis of "species solidarity" which Branden wrote of in "Benevolence versus Altruism" (1962)? I'd bet a Coca-Cola that potential of any sort is not the most basic reason humans are protective of human infants. I know all the usual chant about children being most precious because "they are our future." That is a preciousness for sure, but not the main preciousness of the individual child one is dealing with. It's a more human-to-human-as-particulars thing than any sort of considerations about continuation of the species or potentials of the actual child at hand.*

Politicians over-rate the significance the general electorate attaches to this issue. When exit polls show there is a weight to economic issues, I doubt this is what any voter not a sot Democrat has in mind.

The Smiles of the Pope Are upon Them – A Year after Overturn of Roe

That Lecture I'm not hearing the distinction among the two classes of error you mention, RF. Can you find it and give me the time in the lecture it begins? Are you thinking of some other distinction he made? I cannot imagine a type of error that should be called "metaphysical." I've never heard this idea and going by that name in the history of philosophy. Does it mean when we make mistakes about metaphysics? I know of what is sensibly called theory of truth as metaphysical. In Objectivism and in my own related framework, that notion is sensible only insofar as what they mean by "metaphysical truth" is simply "fact." There is also a traditional idea of metaphysical good and evil, as distinct from physical good and evil and as distinct from moral good and evil. In most-general metaphysics, good and evil is an invalid idea. The "metaphysically good" or "metaphysical goodness" comes from the idea that being and the good are one. Objectivism and I too hold that there is a different metaphysical oneness and it is the only oneness at that deep level in most-general metaphysics: the existence of an existent is the same as the existence of its total identity. There is no goodness or perfection or degrees of those among existents except in the context of life-existence, Rand had it, and I think her insight on this is correct (and profound and original). Was Peikoff making some other distinction, one branch of which you have come in memory to think with the term metaphysical error?

Let's try again. Resource at the Library of Congress for Good Firsthand Recollections of Lives of Enslaved People

Resource at the Library of Congress for Good Firsthand Recollections of Lives of Enslaved People

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 23, Nos. 1–2, (2023), pp. 218–79. MARSHA FAMILIARO ENRIGHT ~Comment by me on core of Marsha's paper: In the natural formation of the first cell, the potentials of the physical factors going into that formation are not, singly or together, ends-directed to getting that formation. Enright concurs in that. That unicellular organisms have self-directing behaviors (without intentionality, but directive all the same) would seem then to be the result purely of physical factors not having self-directing behaviors. And, as Enright acknowledges to some extent, the ongoing research on how that first natural formation happened would seem to be an important part of explaining how life, with its self-directing characteristics, has come to be. (That is, as well, how value came into the world.) At Objectivism Online, we have a thread that accumulates research on the origin of life. Clastic sedimentary rocks, such as sandstone, are formed from other types of rock already present and by certain physical conditions on the surface of the planet. It is an ends-free series of events that there comes to be clastic sedimentary rocks. It seem to me credible that the first natural cell could be formed by ends-free series of events. Once living things have appeared, ends-free series of events can continue to occur to them and within them, which may be detrimental to continuing that form of life or may be harmless or advantageous. To the result of successor life, because there are numerous single-cell individuals and colonies and multicellular organisms, such organism-rennovations upon novel events are never purely series of accidents. I don’t think that would be a fair way to characterize them in contrast to self-direction. Rather, they are ends-free incidents popping up under the follow-on crushing circumstance of natural selection. Like engineering something under a lot of trial and error and keep trying. Only with nature, there is no trying, only novel occurrence and its continuance within life or not. Explaining life-continuing vegetative behaviors such as response of gravitropic roots on occasion of uprooting in terms of physical and chemical sequences is explanation (only partial if without the larger evolutionary context) of self-directive behavior, but it is no denial or making small of the fact it explains. There are old notions in organismic biology that did need to be radically reduced, or explained away. Meaning we could and should stop using them. Just as the use of the phrase and idea “natural selection” as a force, which Enright mentions. Or, perhaps, for that matter, thinking of a concentration gradient as a driver of diffusion. Most famously for biology I gather was the notion of “vital force” (as in the vitalism history Enright addresses). I have a solid modern science book titled The Vital Force: A Study of Bioenergetics. The notion of a vital force was such a cover for ignorance and warrant for intellectual laziness and often magical accounting of life, that it is best by now to boot it and replace it with the bioenergetic account. I suggest, as does Enright, that that is unlike the situation of the phenomena of directedness in living systems, including in vegetative systems. Although one states the function of a part in a machine (a part such as a spark plug) at the level of system design for such a machine—cf. schematic diagrams v. wiring diagrams of electrical appliances—one nevertheless thinks of the part in its function as a cause. This suggest that, similarly, it is sensible to think of function of an organism part, such as ribosomes or mitochondria, as actual causes (function-driven ones), but causes requiring implementation by the structured physics and chemistry which underlies their operation. The circumstance that the schematic diagram in the natural organism case has been drawn only after the appearance of organisms themselves is no impairment to the effectiveness of the analytic parallel. Enright’s ample layout on Harry Binswanger’s book The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts is nice, and I think it gives the reader of her paper who has not read him a pretty fair picture of what he was up to. I do not concur in Enright’s particular criticisms of his account. And more generally, I do not concur in Enright’s statement of a contemporary intellectual problem in biology—seeing actions of survival and reproduction as “just inanimate chemical and physical actions” (219)—and need of any remedy for such a thing. Enright has good information on relation of life to thermodynamics. Although, I’d stress that living things do not violate conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics. Utilities came into existence only with the advent of life in the universe, Rand and I and Marsha affirm. The utilization of energy and the storage of energy for utility are processes due to life and its nature, but perfectly in tune with all the physics of energy. Also, as Enright mentions, living systems are open systems, thermodynamically speaking. I’d stress with that that living processes are fully in accord with the laws of thermodynamics; life is not cheating them or getting around them. The perpetual production of entropy by life or any operations of organized matter is compensated for in a living system by the infusion of energy or energy-rich matter preserving the living organization. Metabolism is no affront to thermodynamics. Metabolism is the turnover of free energy—a thermodynamic concept important for some important engineering—for use in life.

ABC Ipsos polls Overall, 61% say the federal charges related to Trump’s handling of classified documents are serious, compared to 52% answering the same about Trump’s April indictment in New York on charges related to a payment of hush money.

John Gillis has a good article on Frank Lloyd Wright here.