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South Africa's been loading 60 percent on US imports while its exports there have been til now surcharged little in return? Did not know this. There's method in the semi-reciprocity madness. We'll see most countries scrambling to drop import tariffs to stay in the lucrative US market I fancy. https://youtu.be/qaU43ACtpyo?si=YdsaRH2onCHjiW3d

No, borders still matter for defining jurisdiction and military aggression. Open borders means borders should not limit people's freedom of movement and should not limit their freedom to produce and trade.

Godel's result applies only to systems that consist exclusively of logically deducing propositions from other propositions. It does not apply to any system that involves induction or reasoning on the level of concepts or starting with the evidence of the senses or checking conclusions against reality. Thus it applies neither to human cognition nor to Ayn Rand's philosophy. Concepts are very different from sets.

That feels like infants are more right brain dominate a la McGilchrist.

Tax hikes by other names: Inflation, Tariff.

I'm sorry to hear about the health issues you're experiencing in your household, Stephen. My take-away from what I've read is not vast, but I think this may be a key point to consider: You can’t omit what you’re not aware of; measurement sensitivity must come before measurement-omission, therefore it must come before concept creation. Also, research by Clearfield and Mix (1999) suggest that infants may base their discrimination capabilities more on contour length than on the number of items, indicating a preference for continuous extent over numerical information in certain contexts. Mathematical concept-formation did not accompany this process, as Rand stated. This ability developed some time after.

Carey 2009 is what Part 2 and Part 3 of my "Capturing Quantity" study upstream (six years ago) was assimilating, CD. This non-diligence of readers for what I work so hard to write is getting very discouraging. In the past year, one scholar from off top of his head "recalled" that in my 2004 paper Universals and Measurement, which tried to locate minimal magnitude structure in ontology required for AR's distinctive sort of analysis (not genesis) of concept structure assimilating concretes, "recalled" as mine a view I oppose, a tangential view championed by a friend of mine writing a response to my article. And in another case, a scholar wrote an entire scholarly article praising me and corroborating a position I supposedly took in an article I wrote in the 1990's. In that case, my old article was still in front of her black and white, and any place I had touched on this point she was defending, I had dismissed that view (that QM processes are plausibly behind neuronal processes in our occasions of choices.) Doggone it. I can dumb things down and sloganize them for making them easy to grasp and remember. But then there is no actual there there. Or I can acknowledge to myself that the real me, which is most available in my serious philosophy writings, was seldom really seen (but by editors). I'll try not to grumble further; I've had Covid the last few days, and I've been struggling to care for my husband whose case is worse.

HT to Jim Peron for alerting folks to this article – FB

Special elections in Florida and Wisconsin provided shots across the bow to the Trump Administration, at least according to the Wall Street Journal. The GOP retained two safe congressional seats in Florida, albeit with less-safe margins than normal, and lost the election for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. Whatever one can glean from elections so early in a term, I think it is fair to say that if there really is a "MAGA backlash," it is nothing compared to what there will be if the worst-case scenario of Trump's "liberation day" tariffs -- 20% or more across the board -- comes to pass; and then either Trump refuses to back down or Congress fails to get him under control by finding the will to take back its authority over tariffs. If that happens, that paper's warnings to the GOP will definitely apply:Republicans can console themselves that they held the Florida seats and thus their narrow House majority. And we hope the results don't scare House Republicans into backing away from their tax and regulatory reform agenda. That's what Democrats would love, so next year they'd get the benefit both ways -- motivated Democrats and sullen Republicans after a GOP governing failure. But the elections are a warning to Mr. Trump to focus on what got him re-elected -- especially prices and growth in real incomes after inflation. His willy-nilly tariff agenda undermining stock prices and consumer and business confidence isn't helping. [bold added]The piece goes on to note the worst consequences of the Democrat victory in Wisconsin:As for Wisconsin, Republicans in that state will now have to live with a willful Supreme Court majority that could reverse nearly everything the GOP accomplished under former Gov. Scott Walker. School vouchers, collective-bargaining reform for public workers, tort reform and more are likely to be challenged in lawsuits by the left. Congressional district electoral maps will also be challenged and could cost the GOP two House seats. [bold added]Given that the only indications of congressional action on tariffs so far has been either merely symbolic or the exact opposite of what is needed, I expect a bloodbath in the midterms. The cowards in the GOP would do well to start fearing their constituents more than the President. -- CAVLink to Original

Yes, and what was it? My question was about exactly what he said in support of an exception for the case of Israel. In other words, how did he justify it? From what you've written so far, it doesn't seem that you know what his argument was.

Granted the article does attack Objectivist principals but not as argument against principles per se , it seems more just for ‘fun’.

Such insults are explicitly prohibited by the site's Guidelines. I asked you "What was his [Yaron Brooks] position on the subject?" Have you personally read/heard him presenting his argument? Or you base your critique on second-hand accounts of his arguments? If this is the case, then it is not a good idea. Telling it like it is isn't the definition of an insult just because you don't want to hear it. Yes I've heard what he has to say and dismissed it as crap long ago. "Open borders" means "borders don't matter" and is absurd on its face. Brooke feels a collectivist tribal affinity for Israel and thinks they should be exempt from open borders. The US shouldn't have open borders.

Aren't you imputing a motive to the author that you don't know exists? Where in the article does Beam call out Objectivist principles?

The only reason they're trying to undermine Rand and Peikoff is so that they can undermine the principles, as a form of ad hominem attack.

Principles? The NBI was practicing a type of collectivist ideology while making a pretense of teaching principled individualism. This isn't about Objectivism, it's the NBI, Rand and Peikoff in my comment above. Ayn Rand demanded obedience to her word. That was not individualism. The article about Rand and Peikoff doesn't discuss Objectivism so much. It's not about a failure of principles, but of a failure to follow them.

Anti-objectivists are full of triumphant little fairy tales like this: "... and this, boys and girls, is why you shouldn't try to have any principles." But they don't have anything better to offer, and they know it. (In related news, I heard that Elon Musk blew up a rocket once, which proves that all of rocket science is pretentious and useless.)

From the Atlantic article THE ATLANTIC on Rand and Peikoff: Peikoff had never had much success with women, and Rand offered to act as matchmaker. Reading through her mountains of fan mail, she and members of her circle kept an eye out for young women who might be a good fit. In 1955, they found a promising candidate: an aspiring actor and dancer named Daryn Kent. On their first date, Peikoff and Kent talked for hours about their shared admiration for Howard Roark, The Fountainhead’s protagonist. The two started dating and moved in together. (Kent also began working for Rand as a typist.) “I was in love with her,” Peikoff later said. According to Rand, love is inherently selfish: You love someone not as an act of altruism but because they share your values and make you feel good. If your morals are aligned, Rand argued, sexual attraction follows. One day, Kent arrived at Rand’s apartment to find a group of Collective members, including Peikoff, sitting in a circle waiting for her. They had decided that she wasn’t right for Peikoff. Branden kicked off what amounted to a struggle session, interrogating Kent for hours about her psychology and personal life, including her sexual behavior, according to Anne C. Heller’s biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Mortified, Kent committed to undergoing psychotherapy with Branden. But it was over between her and Peikoff; she moved out that night. Peikoff later said that he regretted the outcome, but that a prestigious member of the group—likely Branden—had “pressured me, in a way that I shouldn’t have been, into it.” When ideology governs intimacy, autonomy gets sacrificed to correctness, and morality is sacrificed to the will of the group (literally, "The Collective" in this case).

Objectivist gossip gets less interesting as each generation passes.

@Cave_Dweller – I have rejected for some years now the 1991 view I expressed: "Contradiction is the fundamental fallacy of deductive inference." PNC is one way of avoiding conflict with existence, but not the only way. There are mathematical results that can be proven using only PNC ("indirect proof"), such as Hilbert's Ph.D. thesis proving the Mean Value Theorem. But so far as I know, there is no proof using PNC alone (indirect proof), for the fact that all odd counting numbers n (n2 -1) is evenly divisible by 4. Mathematical induction yields the proof. I incline to call mathematical induction deductive inference because it eliminates any possibility of exceptions. Another idea I held forth in "Induction on Identity" is to treat genidentity as a causal relationship. Getting in tune with the usual talk concerning causality, the cause and the effect must be two different things, not just the same thing at different times. Also i should object to David Kelley's thesis that all empirical induction is based on causal relations. Some empirical inductions are establishing non-causal explanations.* An easier access to my formulation of the Law of Identity which does not assert uniform uniqueness of causal effect, down from the 1991 paper, is here.

Mississippi, where I was born and raised, has made headlines for being the first state to eliminate an existing income tax. Unfortunately, any notices concerning the death of the income tax there are premature. Having followed the news lately, I knew that the elimination would follow a timetable, as almost any such reform would. What I didn't know is how long a timetable that is:The new law put Mississippi on a path to become the first state to eliminate an existing income tax, per the Associated Press. The measure reduces the tax over time, dropping .25 percent annually starting in 2027. Once the rate reaches 3 percent in 2031, further reductions must be offset by "growth triggers" to ensure the state has adequate resources to operate. In addition to the move on income tax, the new law also cuts the state sales tax on groceries from 7 percent to 5 percent and boosts the gas tax by 9 cents to 27.4 cents per gallon. ... Neva Butkus, a senior analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, estimated the state will lose $2.6 billion from its current $7 billion budget as a result of phasing out the income tax. Additionally, as Butkus told Mississippi Today, the action may be ill-timed given Washington's current cost-cutting mentality. As AP reported, Mississippi's economy and budget are among the most reliant on federal spending in the nation, and therefore, any future budget cuts or federal grant freezes by Congress would be felt more deeply than in other states. [bold added]Hmmmmm. I advocate limited government and ultimately the abolition of all taxation. I am under no illusions about time tables: I am sure there will be taxation until the day I die, and I have no reason to believe that we are anywhere close to turning the tide against continued growth of the welfare state. (In other words, the process will take time and we are nowhere near starting it.) Even the "cost-cutting mentality" cited by Butkus is a mirage, given Trump's refusal to even consider phasing out entitlement spending, which isn't a proper function of government, and yet consumes the lion's share of the budget in today's welfare-regulatory state. (Ironically, the transience of this "mentality" might end up helping the plan work, but at the likely much higher cost of the federal government raising taxes.) So, while I love the idea of eliminating the income tax, I am highly skeptical of the eventual success of even this plan, given that I have heard of no corresponding cuts in Mississippi's own spending, and that's even before we account for the state's heavy reliance on federal money. None of this means I won't be pleasantly surprised some time in the future -- Reaching zero could afford well over a decade. -- and even this measure was a pleasant surprise. But rolling back the welfare state is even harder than this measure was to accomplish, because it requires a revolutionary improvement in our culture to occur first, that will cause at least a sizable minority to loudly demand freedom over the illusion of safety and security. This attempt at a shortcut was hard, and there are no shortcuts. -- CAVLink to Original

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth” S. Holmes tat twam asi

How do you know there are no contradictions in reality? This is a metaphysical claim. However, it's not empirical, at least not in the usual sense. This claim cannot be induced from the facts of reality. It only helps along the belief that the universe is intelligible and, as Rand would go on to state, that there are no miracles or other non-causal events. The principle of non-contradiction is also (when extracted from logic into metaphysics) a transcendental and ontological principle. On the one hand, it makes an absolute, ontological claim about the nature of reality. On the other hand, it is transcendental in that it serves as a condition for thought and experience. So not only is thought to be limited by this principle, experience itself will never reveal an event that is contradictory (a rose that is all red and all green at the same time). Of course our eyes aren't constructed to see such anything as all-green/all-red. And the mind could be wired so as to maintain coherence in experiences. So because we've never seen any contradictions in reality -- although people claim to have observed miracles or other supernatural events -- the law of non-contradiction is posited to be a law of nature. To suggest that there are miracles or other supernatural events is not to posit mysticism as primary over common-sense empiricism. It just means that reality may, at times, surprise us.

Peikoff and Harriman say that chance and statistics aren't allowed in physics. That should go for any hard science. Causality only. I don't know what they'd say about the chance of air molecules joining in the corner of a room. I guess it's possible that there doesn't have to be a vacuum, that the air molecules will be replaced by new ones from outside the room. From the strict conditions Kittel gives for this scenario, I don't think outside influences are allowed. It would have to be an air-tight, sealed room with certain temperature requirements. But I won't pretend any further that this is resolved by philosophy, especially when I don't understand.

Objectivist David Harriman lays down the law for physicists.

"I don't see the laws of nature allowing such a vacuum by chance." You need statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.* To think about physics one first needs physics. Same for geometry. . . .