Boydstun

NATO NATO Nuclear Deterrence

The facts about Manning are physical facts of his surgery, hormone injections, and consequent changes in its body. Also, its facts of action as charged in his criminal conviction. The facts in the charges against Assange will be determined by a jury from the evidence. Those facts are whatever they are already, but they will not be accepted legally unless he is convicted. We have designed that legal determination process such that some guilty people will be judged Not Guilty even though the alleged facts of the case as brought by the prosecution are indeed the facts of reality; so that fewer innocent people will be wrongly found guilty. Persons who have their sex changed by surgery and hormones are not the same as someone who senses they are psychologically a different sex without such a physical-alteration project (I'm not entirely convinced there are any such things as male versus female sexual psychologies, such as put about by Rand and Branden, that are independent of brainwashing of the children by the culture, i.e., there may well be no such distinct psychologies that are purely an outcome of biological nature). In official government documents, I'd think the proper pronoun or salutation for them is just as for those us who don't feel that way. Manning is in a different category: the category of having undergone the medical, physical alteration, last I heard. There is a marble sculpture of old of an hermaphrodite, which turns my stomach. Also, I dislike drag queenery. But the circumstance that such matters are top political issues for voters grossed out by such sculpture or human behaviors is bad for the future of our country. Such cultural issues promoted to political hay have gotten way out of proportion in comparison to the circumstances that people are having to pay so much for groceries or are having their life savings stolen due to government-driven inflation or, as could come in the future if the federal budgets in the red are not stopped, police protection and armed forces can no longer be paid.

From Oxford: The Undivided Self What's the Use of Philosophy?

From Cambridge: The Critique of Judgment and the Unity of Kant's Critical System

From Springer Nature: Identity and Indiscernibility in Quantum Mechanics

From Brill: Time Is a Plant

Tad, It was only a few days ago that I learned I am cisgendered. I had not heard that designation before. It changed nothing about me. It is a trivial aspect of me compared to my mind and character. I thought it a travesty that Manning was allowed to receive its sex-change while in prison. Here I use the pronoun "its" as an insult, because of the crime, the evil, against American persons, he did (in collusion, allegedly, with Mr. Assange). I understand that medical care of federal prisoners is lousy (by our modern standards). I understand that not receiving medical treatment or not being protected from physical attack by other prisoners is never part of the sentence of imprisonment that a judge hands down to a convicted criminal. The intended penalty of imprisonment is loss of liberty, not these additional negative incidents. (A long-time friend of mine was recently in federal prison for nine years. We visited him there, and by correspondence especially, I learned some about how things actually are there and how variable they are between locations. The vendors are making a fortune, that's for sure. At one of the prisons our friend was in, he and most everyone got Covid. Ten inmates died. At another prison, he was beaten up.) I don't know law concerning rights of inmates to medical care, but it seemed to me the procedure given to Manning was rather towards the luxury end of modern medicine. My hostility to Manning (and Assange) aside, Tad, it seems right that official government documents refer to individuals who are transsexuals by the gender pronoun most suited to the result of the sex change, not the past. So far as I know, the chromosomes are not changed, but there is a lot more to the biological identity of a human than that, and in our species, person and mind are paramount to all else. I have only one personal friend who is a transsexual (woman-to-man). We have never discussed it; we have the interests in common of work and love, which is usual and what we talk of. He is a bright and good and wonderful person. He has a husband and they've been together about thirty years. When people belittle transgendered persons, it is he who comes to my mind, and it's not rocket science to figure whose side I'm on.

From The University of Chicago Press: How Life Works Wisecracks (by a good and gifted classmate of mine) The Culmination (I'll try to do the rest of the presses tomorrow for this round of accumulation. It has been odd to me that no younger friendly Objectivist philosopher acquaintance ever asked if they could have my library when I have deceased. My collection is always more up to date than their own university library. I did find the right philosopher to whom I have by now bequeathed it: Prof.)

From Hackett: Aristotle's Chemistry

From De Gruyter, I've now ordered: Process Realism in Physics The books in this thread are ones I got to examine at the book stalls of the academic presses at the Eastern Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York last week.

I'll try to let you know what The Individualists says about Ayn Rand when I receive it. Others I've ordered from this great press this year: Failures of Forgiveness What Is Political Philosophy? Free Agents When Animals Dream

Just click on the link I provided in that post. US Charges against Assange – I think US law should be enforced. If one thinks these laws are wrong, repeal them by our democratic process. (I happen to agree with the cause of American defense against foreign powers and these laws pursuant to that.) Mr. Assange, by the way is no Henry David Thoreau in the way of civil disobedience: the latter was willing to go to jail for the sake of his principle (and he actually had a principle). I'm with you on policy of high bank reserve requirements, fractional or full. And no bailouts (see that link).

The greatest threat to the future of America as a prosperous place and place of civil peace is continuation of the federal deficit budgets of the last 23 years. The federal government is stealing the life savings of Americans by inflation to cover the ongoing budgets in the red. Against continuation of that: vote for Haley against Trump. The choice between Haley and Biden or Phillips will be more difficult because the Democrats are squarely Pro-Choice. But the choice between Haley and Trump at this stage is easily Haley. As Bastiat put it: Let us try freedom.

Let's try those links again. Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution by Anne O'Donnell. The Individualists by Matt Zwolinsky and John Tomasi

Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution by Anne O'Donnell. The Individualists by Matt Zwolinsky and John Tomasi

I was able to attend this Meeting of APA and this particular session. Massimino's presentation shadowed his paper in the final issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies last summer. Abstract of that fine paper: The author argues Ayn Rand made a genuinely novel, but often overlooked and underappreciated, contribution in her synthesis of Aristotelianism and liberalism. Aristotelianism, a philosophy of flourishing, and liberalism, a politics of freedom, have been viewed throughout history as largely incompatible doctrines, often understandably so. The author discusses the history of these concepts, especially their tensions, as a backdrop to further explore and contextualize the work of Rand, who argued that Aristotelian ideas about flourishing and liberal ideas about freedom are natural allies, and in fact strengthen each other. Rand's "Aristotelian liberalism" is a fruitful synthesis. Other presentations at this APA session, which was organized by Prof. Roderick Long: "The Problem of Pervasive Historic Injustice" by Prof. Jason Lee Byas "A Radical Liberal Approach to LGBTQ Emancipation" by Dr. Nathan Goodman These presentations and their follow-on Q&A's were informative and incisive. Roderick organized another session Nation-States, Nationalism, and Oppression which I did not attend because in that time slot I was shopping. The Ayn Rand Society did not have a session at this Eastern APA meeting. Perhaps Greg and Jim will pull something together for Central (New Orleans) or Pacific (Portland).

Original Sham – Rand and Nietzsche (continued, completed) I remarked earlier: "Notwithstanding his naturalism, Nietzsche comes up short of admitting the absolute, complete finality of the end of one’s one and only sequence of episodes of life, the life engaging one last week, yesterday, and at this moment." I suggest that Nietzsche's elaborate wrestling with an eternal return of the same is a self-deceit decked out in a Yes-saying to a false contrivance. (Contrast with the commendation by John Richardson in his Nietzsche's Values [2020].) The real gravity Nietzsche cannot get rid of is mundane and plain: his own death will necessarily occur, and that will be his complete annihilation. Some non-metaphorical and sensible lifting of that gravity is here: Nietzsche moved his pen to much upset of Christian doctrines. (His father was a Lutheran minister.) One erroneous view he failed to jettison in his own philosophy is the presumption (of Moses, Socrates, and many others) that knowledge of human constitution is the most important kind of knowledge for the human world, whether life of the individual or situation of the species. It is important, I say, though not most important and most-maker of humanity’s epochs. Knowledge more important in making the human world: how to make a spear and a bow for arrows; script for language; a wheel and its bearing; a plow; metals from minerals; irrigation channels; working animals; power from water wheels, combustion engines, and electric motors; computation, communication, and illumination from electromagnetism; and scientific medicine. Rand championed such knowledge as that, but for her atypical miss of the productivity of the gardener in the myth of the Garden of Eden. “All work is creative work if done by a thinking mind” (AS 1021). Frankly, one is not going to have supper on the table or fire in the fireplace without some labor and some thinking mind preparing those results, and either there are going to be some sparkles of creativity all along the way or the required thinking and the result will not be attained. Rand held advances in science, mathematics, logic, and engineering to be exemplars of noblest human morality. That in man which makes those advances possible and actuated is identically moral goodness, both-and-one of which man should be rightly pleased and proud. “A rational process is a moral process” (AS 1017). Nietzsche disdained and belittled such knowledge. He fancied new epochs in the human world by new ways in new religions (viz., as when Christianity overran Greco-Roman religions) and new philosophies (for the future, particularly his own philosophy) bringing forth from man the following: higher, nobler, more active beings (who evidently omit working for a living) (GM I.10). Nietzsche thinks European fellows of his time are a value-dead, sorry lot much in need of new, exciting values now that God is no longer a live source of credible values. So far as I know, this claim of deficiency in his fellows and their consequent need of a solution is a fake, a sham. It remains an unfounded estimate concerning plebeians, folks in production and trade, nothing more. Nietzsche writes, plausibly, that he cannot refrain from philosophic thought, such as he conceives such thought, and its continual improvement in himself (GM I.2). He claims of himself a durable will to knowledge, but only knowledge of a sort he would enshrine as the purpose of scientific knowledge. Nietzsche was in fact an ignoramus concerning scientific, mathematical, and engineering advances of his own time, and what interest he had in them was for twisting them into bolsters for his psycho-dynamical speculations, his favorite activity. Nietzsche is awake to the existence of physical goods such as life on earth. He is awake to psychological goods such as the absence of suffering and unearned guilt. He knows to reject moralities of guilt, Sin, Original Sin, debt to God, and duty; moralities against sexual enjoyment (GM II.21, III.16, III.22–22). He and Rand, in their different ways, survey past moralities and expose their defects. Nietzsche failed to find any new, coherent morality corrective of the past ones and based in life and its enjoyments. Rand succeeded.

In this photo, Moses is testifying in his own defense against four charges brought against him by Ayn Rand. I find he was falsely accused on three of the four counts when one looks into what he wrote.

The Pope continues his political campaigning for secular laws banning abortions, assisted suicide, and surrogacy. Altar-Throne impetus you have with you always. It must, for liberty, be actively opposed with your vote.

Traitor for ideology Traitor for money

ET, In the case of the table (and other objects), I'd think part of the value of the table for anyone would be its facilities for human actions such as providing a way to keep things off the floor (not stepping on things or tripping on them) and a feasible way to support a book while reading or supporting a plate one is eating from. Those facts about the entry of a table into human actions are objective. They are relative to human actors, but the mechanics of these actors and the facilities the table can fulfill for those actors (there are some such facilities and not others) are matters of objective fact. Even if one went big-generalization, such as in Dewey, and took objects' identities in our identifications to be all reducible to the possible facilities they can provide for us, it would not make those facilities and identities subjective in the sense of being basically dependent on caprice. The facilities are objective relations between objects and minded actors, minded subjects. The subject-relations in whether something is good for one as maintained by Protagoras in Plato's dialogue of that name was squeezed into a case for the idea that right values are intrinsic in things, independent of subjects, by Socrates/Plato/Catholicism by casting the relativity of the utility of things for man as a matter of human variations decried as inconstancy and caprice. They try to press the conception of objective valuations such as talked of in the preceding paragraph (Rand's view), which is the correct view, into caprice-subjectivism as in a false dichotomy with intrincism. (Part of the identities, for my part, would be objective relations among objects that are not our bodies.) Esthetic experiences occasioned by design of tables also seem independent of caprice, yet, as with the facilitations, relative to constitutions of persons having the experiences. Excellent issues, the market value issues also.

You Can Leave Your Hat On Original Sham

Original Sham – Rand and Nietzsche (continued) Allowing ‘tree” as metaphor for any organically unified process and resulting formation, the “tree of life” in the Garden of Eden is a sham: there is no provider of eternal life ready-made for humans to take. The “tree of knowledge” in the Garden of Eden can be metaphor for something not entirely a sham, though its dedicated fruit (bringing knowledge of good and evil [most particularly, knowing of sexuality]) and the reverence accorded exclusively to that specific sort of knowledge is the stock in trade of shaman and tribalist, and it is in truth not superior to knowledge of how to cultivate a garden. There is only one valid tree for human existence, and this is a tree of limited, but growing knowledge protecting and improving mortal, human life. In all that, I think this apple (my mind) does not fall far from the tree Objectivism. Here are thoughts from Rand on Original Sin. This is some great writing, but for inaccuracy in what the old story says. The story says that man was made in the image of God. A reasonable and traditional reading of that is that man was given the power of reason. He was given the rule to not eat from a certain tree, and at that stage, there is no indication that the man lacked the power of free choice in that matter. It was not from eating the forbidden fruit that man got reason or free will in the picture set forth in the Garden of Eden story. “The devil made me do it” would not have been a valid defense if we stick to the scenario crafted in Genesis. Rand is of course correct in condemning the subsequent determinism towards evil of humans who were descendants of Adam and Eve. That is, she is correct, like many before, to condemn the doctrine of heritable evil in human nature (humans with healthy brain), which is from the doctrine of Original Sin (which does not mean merely the first sin) lain over the story of The Fall and expulsion from Eden, lain over by early Christian theologians.[1] [2] It has occurred to many a thinking Christian that the concept of Original Sin is unjust and does not square with the manifest free will of individuals. They are told by the higher-level defenders of the faith that God’s justice is not the same as human justice, and we cannot fathom the rightness of all the actions of God. There is excellent human irrationality at that Stop sign. Rand errs again, as many do, in thinking of Adam as not already a producer in the Garden of Eden. But the old story says he was a gardener (unlike Tarzan). And he was allowed to eat most any of the produce far as I see in the story. That arrangement might reasonably be seen as commercial transaction in which one’s only asset is one’s labor. Getting expelled and cursed meant for the gardener not that he would have to begin working for a living, only that there would be less success in agriculture, more pain in the labor of it, and a need for overalls. The old story goes that God breathed life into his creature Adam. It would seem unlikely that God needed a garden or gardener, but It might realize a man needs purposeful projects. The Genesis story of the origin of man on the earth does not entail condemnation of human life, reason, morality, or productivity. From Augustine’s sick angle, the story does entail taking sexuality as evil. He and many others take Adam hiding from God after eating the forbidden fruit to be on account of Adam coming to have sexiness in his naked body and to know that sense is shameful. I’d think it more obvious in the story that Adam was hiding mainly because he figured he was in a heap of trouble, regardless of his excuse that he was hiding because he did not want to be seen naked. But, heaven knows, social regulation of sex is ever a burning issue of religions from tribes to Bible-thumpers of today. Kyle Harper concludes in a meticulous study of the Christian transformation of sexual morality in late antiquity: The next installment will be the last in the present study. There I’ll let Nietzsche have his say. To be continued. Notes [1] On the power and the glory of human free will, highly recommended: East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1953), his masterpiece. [2] When I was a child in the 1950’s in America, there was an additional determinism of human nature being put about by millions of Christians. The tale was that Negroes were descendants of a son (or grandson of Noah. Noah's son, in that Bible story, had seen his drunken father lying naked, for which Noah awarded a batch of curses and made the grandson a slave. Going beyond the biblical text, the linkage of the cursed son (or grandson) of Noah to Negros—accursed man begetting the Negros—was part of a characterization by Whites of Negroes as being by nature inferior to Whites. I heard that story a lot. I have other memories of ordinary thinking in those days of badness in individuals being due to “bad blood” at the level of family heredity and hatreds. But enough. References Harper, K. 2013. From Shame to Sin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House.

Original Sham – Rand and Nietzsche I said the Original Sham was that death was not naturally inherent in life. A little-sister sham is misrepresentation in the thought that one’s death is one’s eternal nonexistence. The truth is that a nonexistent has no passage, no situations, and no character. Those are the fundamental categories of things in existence. Some traces of one’s existence from before its end—traces in existents continuing to exist, with their passage, situation, and character, beyond one’s own death—indicate to succeeding humans some of the particular passage, situation (and situating), and character that had been oneself. There is an eternal nonexistence of one before one lived and after one lived, but those do not belong to one. Talk of one’s eternal nonexistence is a lie if the eternity is insinuated to be something attaching to one or endured. Posters reading “Where will you spend eternity?” are a sham multiple times over. Blaise Pascal (1623–62) famously formulates putatively rational arguments—which are known under the umbrella “The Wager Argument,” for why it is not irrational to believe in God.* Pascal first argues that because God would be without limit in Its nature, we who are finite, can know by reason neither the existence or nature of God. I should say such a conception of something, here labeled God, ensures that it does not exist. A thing without limit in its nature can be identically one with my axe and not identically one with my axe. Existence is Identity, as Rand would say. More specifically, and in terms of my own metaphysical categories, Existence is passage, situation, and character. The existent is not free of those limitations (as I have proven elsewhere). Further, if God is not conceived as a particular, indeed a concrete particular, then Its worth is a batch of empty words. Should we allow Pascal, for the sake of further examination of his wager, his false premise that we cannot know by reason whether an infinite thing called God exists? No. His argument requires one enter a game-choice situation in which one is being invited to base belief on desirability of outcome rather than on grasp of fact. Rather, what should be done is this: set aside such morally disrespectful tom-foolery and find the truth. Virtue lies in aiming for truth, and we have gotten it (as surely as we’ve gotten that there are no contradictions in reality because we’ve gotten the Law of Identity): There is no such thing as God or anything supernatural and no such thing as eternal life nor any happiness, suffering, or perspective of one before one existed or after one existed. Nor is there an infinitely long period of non-existence attaching to one before and after one existed. From Pascal’s Pensées: Pascal was a booster of the Original Sin idea. In §446 Pascal relays text he takes from a text he thought to be Jewish; it was really written by a Christian monk: Nietzsche does not throw Pascal’s faculty of “heart” out the window. He throws philosophy without such faculty out the window. “Carefree, mocking, violent—this is how wisdom wants us: she is a woman, all she ever loves is a warrior” Nietzsche writes (GM III, §1, 68). For Nietzsche, finding truth is a ravishment, with the press of perspective that requires. The possibility of an objective standpoint for metaphysics and morals, such as Rand’s standpoint, is out the window. Nietzsche and Rand rejected the supernatural and, along with it, traditional stories on the origin and mortality of human life. The natural and plain view, when supernaturalism is set aside, would be, I say: a person’s self being identically a living process, when an individual dies, it is the complete end of that individual, that self.[1] Notwithstanding his naturalism, Nietzsche comes up short of admitting the absolute, complete finality of the end of one’s one and only sequence of episodes of life, the life engaging one last week, yesterday, and at this moment. I’ll return to this in the sequel. Rand takes religions to contain some amount of mysticism, and that seems correct to me. In her Atlas Shrugged, she takes religious folk to be “mystics of spirit.”[2] In my experience, that picture by Rand of what is going on in the heads of mystics is a poor fit with what is going on (I say in part from my own case). The mysticisms I’m much acquainted with are those holding as part of their faith the Genesis story of the origin of the earth and humans. Probably those were also the faiths most familiar to Rand. She evidently understood, correctly, that much mysticism is planted in the minds of children (see her next paragraph), but she imputes lack of critical, independent mind in the child, as in the adult, to a failure in choices. “Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others” (ibid., 1045). Applied to a first-grader, that is an equivocation on the word “faith.” It is a fact rationally known to the child that the knowledge of adults is superior to her own knowledge. Applied to an adult in the audience of a Billy Graham crusade at the time Atlas Shrugged was published, yes, then the word “faith” is used in constant voice in that statement: a willful suspension of one’s critical independent rationality, thereby aligning with the views of others. I should add, however, that a man getting “saved” at the crusade was able to change his belief about the world and his situation in it only because of the ability of humans to let (to some extent) their beliefs be taken on board by some overriding feelings and wishes, which is intellectual dishonesty and a malfunction of mind. Rand is mistaken in taking placement of other minds above one’s own authority as the root of mysticism of spirit. What will be the content of a mystic’s belief will have been contoured by sermons and childhood indoctrinating stories, to be sure. But the root of all mysticism of spirit is hard-mystic experience. That is a solitary thing. It can spring from miscreant brain states and can be set to holding in abeyance primal fears of absolute annihilation at death. Such a solitary experience was pivotal in the life and mind of Pascal (Hawton 1952, chap. III). One is blameless for accepting mystical beliefs, such as Original Sin, in childhood from one’s elders. In adulthood one is intellectually capable and responsible, and, due to one’s love of God and one’s love of any other faith-imbued family members, one is intellectually courageous to disabuse oneself of such beliefs and the method of faith. Einstein’s childhood religious faith ended abruptly at age twelve. I was eighteen, and the shift was likewise abrupt. No doubt it came to me with my growing background in modern science, but the explicit thought was elementary: Is it possible the universe is just holding itself up, just existing, without assistance from anything supernatural, namely God?—parallel the earth holding itself up without a character such as Atlas? This was somewhat before I began to read Ayn Rand. As soon as I allowed the question to come seriously before my mind, I conceded the affirmative, indeed the actuality of the possibility (and felt a great cleanness, followed by feeling a great benevolence towards all mankind). Rand draws attention to some elements of the Garden of Eden story in its Original-Sin overlay that are profoundly false and morally perverse. Nietzsche rates highly, in some respects, the mindset of Pascal, as we have seen. Nietzsche rejects, however, the supernatural and the notion of Sin. He sees Pascal as of noble soul, but crushed by “the Christian understanding of the weakness and depravity of man” (Pippin 2010, 10). To be continued. Notes [1] Likewise for the species: When the last members needed for reproduction die, the species is ended absolutely, left to nature. [2] Close kin of mystics of spirit would be the idealists in metaphysics from the traditional spectrum idealist-realist-materialist, as well as epistemological skeptics. References Hawton, H. 1952. The Feast of Unreason. London: Watts. Nietzsche, F. 1887. On the Genealogy of Morality. C. Diethe, translator. 2017. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pascal, B. 1662. Pensees. W.F. Trotter, translator. 1958. New York: Dutton. Pippin, R.B. 2010. Nietzsche, Pychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House.

Some handy helpful background: Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Kant famously wrote: "out of such crooked wood as the human being is made, nothing entirely straight can be fabricated" (Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, 1784, translation by Allen Wood). The context of this quote is an acknowledgement that formation and exercise of a political constitution for a society, is in human hands and minds, which means no constitution and its exercise can be perfect. The conclusion, I say, is fair enough truth, but the antecedent thought that humans are made of crooked timber—human nature is corrupt—seems very likely nothing original with Kant; rather, a common view, come down from the likes of Augustine and put about from Christian pulpits of Kant's era (and ours). Grace, Predestination, and Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Catholic Encyclopedia – ORIGINAL SIN