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Well said, @EC. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter.

Who is "allowing"? I'll first point out that Iran was not consistently, economically, financially, morally and intellectually, diplomatically and militarily isolated by the West -- as was e.g. their treatment of Russia, rightly - during - the Cold War (not after). I trust world leaders have now learned to not try to placate, bargain with and bribe ideologically-evil regimes "to be good". Nukes are out. Ground forces will not fare well invading that mountain terrain against a formidable army. . I've reminded before, that whereas Rand wrote any free nation had the right to invade a country and overturn its dictatorial regime - and also added, in effect, a "right" was not to be taken to be a (self-sacrificial) duty. The last gets forgotten. So leave it to Israel. Better (I think) the gvt. bides their time for now, and later hits a few Iranian military and nuclear installations. Israel has to live there and Israel must decide. The emphasis on ~defense~ by the US presently is the right one, I believe. (While they and their partners will have to face up to and eliminate the seaward provocations in the Gulf, this international initiation of force). For Israel: This is a long-term commitment, not about floating principles and the instant gratification of beating the foe.

Monart, It is my understanding that on day of birth one is already immersed in other humans around one. Indeed, before birth, one was already immersed in the human thing that is one's mother's voice. I reject the view, often put forward by classical empiricists, that one performs an inference to know of the presence of other humans, things like oneself, although at the beginning we have no language, so no articulation of any of that in mind. I'd have to look up when we get the idea of we. But as adults or near-adults we can examine our elementary episodes of consciousness and know there is a pronominal other in all of them, a bit that is accessible if we turn to that feature in our consciousness, and by then we know the "we" in those episodes. This presence of other forming the we in all human consciousness perhaps contributes to many peoples' sense that God is with them. If so, that is just a mistake; the presence with themselves is other humans, taken in an open unspecified pronoun-type way. My viewpoint on this, I later learned, had been put forward by some existentialists last century. However, they were engaged in an archeology of subjectivity, whereas in my system, existence standing independently of apprehension and comprehension is the joint objective prize we are joined with by other. I'd like to mention also, concerning the Objectivist metaphysics, that it was not "Existence is Identity" that Rand posed as a corollary of "Existence exists." It was something else, something one could infer if one were making the statement "Existence exists." The thesis "Existence is Identity" can be argued to be something fundamental about Existence and it can be shown that under Rand's various categories, looking to deny Existence is Identity lands in a contradiction. The thesis "Consciousness is identification" is also not a corollary, but a definition of what is the most fundamental sort of consciousness, with any others, such as in dreams, being derivative of the fundamental consciousness. Philosophers of mind today have called that type success consciousness.

The Saudis too https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/saudi-arabia-acknowledges-helping-defend-israel-against-iran-797201 "The best defense is offense", turned on its head. The exemplary manner in which the USN, USAF, the rest of the hasty coalition - and Israel's own defense systems responded, showed that robust defense plays a bigger role in modern war. The attack should have made plain Tehran's motives and methods to the world, how it operates through proxies sowing terror abroad, while playing the big innocent in diplomatic circles - and importantly, it will be less feared now by its neighbors. This stresses how swiftly the Abraham Accords must be revived. A consortium of "moderate" nations will feel more urgently empowered to escape Iran's grasp. The changes will adapt Palestinian minds to the new unity (feared by Iran) and proceed from there to serious negotiations with Israel. . ("Palestine", not the necessary *cause* and condition of M.E. peace, as Islamists and Israel-detractors have always deceitfully insisted - but an *effect* of peaceful national relations -- with Iran permanently cut out . . .

This. And whoever put a laughing emoji to Gus’s post needs a ban as a laughing supporter of evil.

I understand that there are a million details, but the point is that the principle of allowing a totalitarian dictatorship that is the principle creator of virtually all terrorism in the world to exist and continue its actions against anyone at any time, let alone semi-free nations like Israel and our nation, regardless of how it can be "defended against" is appeasement of evil and is why it ( 😉 proof of hacking domestic terrorism as I type this out, but don't derail) this has continued to occur and will continue to occur and get exponentially worse. Especially, a rights violating terrorist dictatorship like Iran potentially possessing nukes. Peikoff wrote after 9/11 that "states" that support terrorism need to be ended, we didn't do and things keep getting worse and will continue getting exponentially worse as a function of time. Ending totalitarian dictatorships that are the source of terrorism, mass death, and evil, while enslaving their own population while attempting to enslave and/or destroy the entire world is the only moral action especially when they start explicitly attacking semi-free free nations and/or threatening their existence not to mention the existence of the world itself.

Yes I wish Stephen as many good years as he wants!

Ayn Rand lived long enough to discover and present an immense system of thought as that guide you seek. If Stephen lives to a hundred, he may write a magnum opus to also help you further along.

My comment at Stephen's FB page: "Existence exists, we live." I follow your explanation of the inference from the former to the latter. Besides the corollaries of "Existence is identity" and "Consciousness is identification", I also know "Life iives", and "One is alive". What are other corollaries that lead from "one(self)" to "other" to "we"? Isn't the "other" an other "one", and "we", "more than one"?

Over the weekend and from its own territory, Iran launched a barrage of hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, using Israel's attack on its "embassy" in Syria as an excuse. I recommend Yaron Brook's real-time reporting and commentary (embedded here). I was out running errands when I began listening. Any time I checked, I found him to be well ahead of other outlets both in terms of timeliness and quality of information. The whole thing was barely a blip in mainstream media, and even sites like the Drudge Report were somewhat late. At one point, Brook noted the issue with the most military significance at present: Iran doesn't have the nuclear capability it has been trying to develop. This attack could have been far worse, and harder to deal with if that had not been the case. And after this weekend there is no doubt that this scenario must be averted, in the minimal form of the destruction of Iran's nuclear weapons facilities. Ideally, the West also does whatever it can to topple the murderous, theocratic regime behind the attack and decades of terrorism and proxy conflicts. See also "End States That Sponsor Terrorism," by Leonard Peikoff. As became apparent during the podcast, the need to end Iran's nuclear capability is a point many in Israel seem to grasp, as the following, quote of former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, tweeted by Open Source Intel would indicate:Some points regarding the overnight Iranian missile attack on Israel:Contrary to what pundits are saying, this wasn't designed merely as "bells and whistles" with no damage. When you shoot 350 flying objects timed to hit Israel at the same moment, when you use three fundamentally different weapon types -- cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and UAVs, you're looking to penetrate Israel's defenses and kill Israelis.The US administration is telling us: "This is a victory, you've already won by thwarting the missiles. No need for any further action." No, it's NOT a victory. Yes, it's a remarkable success of Israel's air defense systems, but it's not a victory. When a bully tries to hit you 350 times and only succeeds seven time, you've NOT won. You don't win wars just by intercepting your enemy's hits, nor do you deter it. Your enemy will just try harder with more and better weapons and methods next time. How DO you deter? By exacting a deeply painful price.It's incorrect to say "nobody got hurt". There's a 7 year-old Israeli-Arab girl called Amina Elhasuny fighting for her life. That's who coward Khamenei hit. The Islamic Republic of Iran made a big mistake. For the past 30 years it's been wreaking havoc on the region -- through its proxies. A terror-octopus whose head is Tehran, and its tentacles are in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Gaza. How convenient. The Mullahs send others to conduct horrendous terror attacks, and die for them. Other people's blood. Israel's strategic mistake for the past 30 years was to play along this strategy. We always fought the Octopus' arms, but hardly exacted a price from its Iranian head. This should change now: Hezbollah or Hamas shoots a rocket at Israel? Tehran pays a price. The enemy is the Iranian REGIME, not the wonderful Iranian people. The Iranian regime reminds me of the Soviet regime in 1985: corrupt to the core, old, incompetent, despised by its own people, and destined to collapse. The sooner the better. The West can accelerate the regime's inevitable collapse with a set of soft and clever actions, short of military force. Remember, USSR collapsed without any need for a direct American attack. Let's do this. Israel is fighting everybody's war. In Gaza, Lebanon and Tehran. We're considered "the small satan" by radical Islam. America is the big one. I'll be clear: if these crazy fanatic Islamic terrorists get away with murder by hiding among civilians, this method will be adopted by terrorists worldwide. We're not asking anyone to fight for us. We'll do the job. But we do expect our allies to have our back, especially when it's tough -- and now it's tough. Be on the right side and help us defeat these horrible and savage regimes.That army of useful idiots -- the ninnies who are worrying about "escalation" -- are ignoring what happened on October 7 and over this weekend: Iran has already escalated unprovoked twice, and is going to escalate again, anyway. Its threats of doing worse if Israel retaliates are superflous and should be ignored, because these theocrats plan atrocities, genocide, and tyranny regardless of what we do. This is war. We should fight it on our own terms. This attack on Israel is a proxy attack on the West by dogs that smell fear. Let's snuff out these animals while they are still weak. -- CAVLink to Original

The Iranian mullahs and their regime are undoubtedly state sponsors of terrorism, ie Hezbollah, Hamas ect, but the current US administration has recently lessened sanctions against Iran that some have described as basically' giving Iran billions in cash' , true or truish does that make the US complicit in their sponsorship? The US state department told Iran it would be best to inform Turkey of launching , what Iran calls reprisals for the attack on their embassy in Syria(?) that killed at least one senior Iranian military commander. The previous US admin killed an Iranian military official 'ex country' and admitted that they know the Iranians would retaliate will a strike but that the strike would be relatively 'minimal' and was allowed as an act of 'face saving'. So , basically, the big boys play at a game were strikes and counter strikes , tits for tats, are expected and warranted. With Jordan seemingly siding with Israel in this particular 'tat' , it looks like something closer to an Abrahamic Accord thingy forming against Iran , than a prelude to doomsday, no ?

Well, allowing an evil terrorist dictatorship that supports almost all terrorism and a large percentage of the evil in the world to attack a semi-free nation regardless of how "successful" without immediately leveling that illegal dictatorship either with conventional weapons and/or nukes means every principle of a moral free society has been tossed out the windows and civilization has already fallen. It will be an extremely short amount of time now until it completely falls into the abyss and ceases to exist. Evil/nihilism/immorality has now essentially won and the world's existence is now numbered and that number can likely be counted in mere days now as a result.

Stephen's mind and their products are one of a kind! Though the longer I contemplate objective reality , the more bereft I come to see no satisfying guide to tie in my selfish subjective experience/relation to all of It.

nope

For a brilliant, innovative synopsis of all Existence, see the new These Hours of Resonant Existence by Stephen Boydstun. It reads like metaphysical poetry.

This is brilliant, innovative, and inspiring. It stimulates wonder and reads like metaphysical poetry. I'm fully engaged and in resonance with it as I marvel at it.

For a brilliant, innovative synopsis of all Existence, see the new These Hours of Resonant Existence by Stephen Boydstun. It reads like metaphysical poetry.

Change your mind? Should have happened on 9/12, and with certainty needs to happen now or a totalitarian terrorist regime becomes "morally" sanctioned, evil spreads exponentially, WW3 starts and civilization ceases to exist.

He's not trying; he's going full tilt. And yet, he thinks that teleology is false. That's a rather odd thing: he claims that something untrue is, in fact, true. It's quite unintelligible, from an Objectivist framework, why someone would ever want to do that. But temporarily switching to Mainländer's standpoint might remove some of that unintelligibility. I suspect that most people (but by no means all of them) would simply yawn if someone told them that atoms tend towards stability. This is because human beings are not computer chips; they are teleological beings, whose constitution is specialized toward value-based frameworks: "want", "avoid", "like", "dislike", "seek", "fight". Suppose we said, instead: "Atoms behave just like us. Humans work to make lots of money, to have a stable and comfortable life. Same for atoms: they too fight to become stable." It's probably safe to assume that many listeners would find themselves involuntarily drawn to this story - even if they never cared about atoms before. Now, consider the following: The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, And drinks and gapes for drink again; The plants suck in the earth, and are With constant drinking fresh and fair; (*) Here, it's quite obvious for all readers that the poet is not actually claiming that the earth is thirsty. Notice, however, that the poem is true all the same. Give some water to your plants, and you will observe that the earth is, truly: very, very thirsty. So thirsty! Equipped with this new standpoint, here is Mainländer - the philosopher whose metaphysics is teleological - lambasting someone who took teleology to be literally true: "You teach a teleology that cannot be thought of as more comprehensive and terrible. You assume millions and billions of miracles every minute, and you, cruel romantic, want to throw us back into the dark Middle Ages, i.e., forge us into the dreadful chains of the physico-theological proof of the existence of God. You philosophize as if Kant were yet to be born, as if we are not fortunate enough to possess the second part of his Critique of Judgment. Do you wish to be a serious man of science, an honest researcher of nature? Do you not know that absolute teleology is the grave of all natural science?" - Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Vol. II., p. 570) And now we can revisit Mainländer's claim that the function of the world is to destroy all useful energy. Does the world really pursue that goal, or in fact, any goal? Probably not. Does everything unwittingly contribute to entropy, as if the world pursued its own demise? Yes. The judgement is true, just as the earth is, in fact, thirsty. Long before I discovered Objectivism or Kant, I was spontaneously creating regulative explanations of the world for myself. At no time did I believe those explanations to be factual; their factuality was beside the point. They satisfied my soul -much more than any dry descriptions of facts. Briefly put, a regulative judgement does not merely communicate facts; it makes those facts sink deep into your skin. It can turn something like entropy into a worldview that makes people be at peace with tension and chaos, and more mindful of what's worth pursuing and what isn't. And that's one way philosophy can contribute to human happiness.

These Hours of Resonant Existence

So not just an Italian thing , lol.

Too much of it. Fortunately there came to be philosophers not in that cascade. One of them made high virtue of keeping the trains running on time. By the way, the most productive theoretical work to come out of ancient Greece, I'd say, was Euclid, not Plato-Aristotle nor even the syllogistic.

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. According to New ideal, the Ayn Rand Institute is promoting a booklet titled Finding Morality and Happiness Without God, and quotes author Onkar Ghate:The basic reason religion remains such an esteemed aspect of American society is that it is considered important, even indispensable, to morality. The strongest form this idea takes is that morality depends on religion -- that without God, the distinction between good and evil loses meaning, and anything goes.Mentioning happiness in the title should intrigue the more active-minded: Thanks to religion, most people associate fear and guilt with morality, and are reluctant if not afraid to think about this life-and-death topic. We can blame the all-encompassing cultural stranglehold of religion for the fact that, while the true purpose of morality should be a huge sales advantage for Objectivism in the marketplace of ideas, it will cause suspicion for most. I think the exeception I noted above will more than offset the current disadvantage, since those who will be intrigued will inlcude some future intellectuals. 2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn advocates the free market as the solution the medical care crisis caused by Canada's government-run system. She outlines what this might look like in part:The very small percentage of people who could not afford to pay for health care or insurance would depend on private charity, and the quality of care would be protected, not only through competition and rights-protecting laws, but by private third-party licensing/certification. Healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses, and others) benefit from private health care because competition among providers would enable them to negotiate fair compensation and working conditions, which in turn would attract more professionals to health care and eliminate staff shortages and burnout. The private healthcare providers (hospitals, clinics, professional practices) and medical insurance companies benefit by profiting from the quality and competitive pricing of their services.It is worth noting why Woiceshyn goes into such detail: The lack of truly private systems worldwide makes "envisioning how such a system would work ... difficult." 3. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney addresses an interesting question that I'd put as What is the difference between a habit and an internal (psychological or mental) context?Image by Ping Lee, via Unsplash, license.Thanks to the influence of behaviorism, the term "habit" is commonly used to subsume a wide range of repeatable or regular behavior, regardless of the cause of such behavior. The problem with this is that different repeatable, regular behavior can have fundamentally different causes. Psychological concepts need to be defined in terms of fundamentals, i.e., by means of root causes, not superficial similarities. For this reason, I limit the term "habit" to automatized perceptual motor skills, i.e., physical actions that happen automatically in response to awareness of a particular kind of environment, unless you intervene to stop them.This is an important distinction: bad habits and unhelpful contexts make desirable self-directed action harder, but because they have different causes, combating or replacing them requires different approaches, which Moroney discusses throughout. 4. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger considers the common claim that the United States is a "representative democracy." The most interesting part of the piece to me was the following:[Confusion on this issue is] because one needs to use the right method of concept formation. The right method allows one to validate one's concepts, rather than merely picking one term from those available.Picking one term from those available is ubiquitous today, and explains lots of what is wrong with the current political discourse. And that means not just that practically everyone falls into it on at least some issues, but it can be easy for those who don't to forget or be unaware that that is what often happens. This can affect how best to argue for a good position. The rest of the piece is highly instructive, both for its demonstration of the correct method of approaching the question and for its answer. -- CAVLink to Original

So Whitehead was correct that western philosophy is a footnote to Plato?