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An owner of a speciality pipe fitting manufacture in Albany entered a grounds maintainance fee invoice as a supply invoice in his private records , should he be concerned ? That statute sounds ripe for elasticity.

"In the course of my initial presentation during the debate, I quoted Miss Rand's statement (from "The Objectivist Ethics") that 'happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions'. Could anyone ever be happy when held to this extreme standard? I asked. And scores of voices from the audience screamed back (somewhat to my surprise): Yes!!!" (294). That reminded me of GK Chesterton, in the 2nd chapter of his Orthodoxy , presents his oft quoted aphorism "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason". And ends it with " But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. "

His Twitter/X page indicates conspiracy theorist. Could be hypothesizing, but he sounds pretty convinced to me.

Indictment, updated, of this case, with jury selection currently underway: People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump

Hypothesist

Hello, Descartes and Hume, as amateur philosophers, were not university philosophy teachers. European philosophers didn't go professional until the 18th century. Some ancient Greeks were professional philosophers. I believe the first modern professional philosopher was Kant, who taught at the University of Königsberg. I understand that amateur philosophy wasn't a genre until the 19th century. But amateur philosophy existed before that.

Why live at all? The canned Objectivist response to this question goes something like this: "A motive is a reason for doing something, and survival is the only reason for doing anything. If you don't want survival, motives are irrelevant to you." The number of real-world people who find this answer useful is probably slim to none, so we can move on with our investigations. Why live at all? I think Objectivism somewhat indirectly answers this question through its distinction between "motivation by love" and "motivation by pain". Let us quickly concertize both. "Why live at all?" Answers motivated by fear of pain: Dying is painful or scary; plus, a botched suicide might leave me in a disabled condition. I fear that dying is not truly the end, and a worse fate will expect me. It would pain me to bring sadness or disillusionment to my loved ones. Answers motivated by love of life: The suffering I am going through will soon end, then I'll be rocking a good life again. I'm having fun. There's still plenty of movies to see, lots of sex to have, many spiritual heights to unlock. My life is decent but I'm expecting a breakthrough. In the future, there lies the X I'm looking for: spiritual triumph over distress and dissatisfaction of all kinds. For now, I'll skip over the "motivation by pain" part and jump straight to motivation by love. As far as the latter goes, what can Objectivism do for: People for whom pleasure is no longer impressive or attractive enough to justify the purchase of an entire life. Individuals who feel like their accomplishments so far have not gotten them closer to happiness, but have merely changed the specifics of their lifestyle (and so it will continue). I'd say that there's not much the Objectivist ethics can do for such people, because ethics presupposes that: a). pleasure is blowing your mind, and b). you see the future with rose-tinted glasses. By contrast, if you think that pleasure is not all it's cracked up to be, or that the future is nothing special (when the dust eventually settles), you may start to feel as Fichte said: "Shall I eat and drink only that I may hunger and thirst and eat and drink again, till the grave which is open beneath my feet shall swallow me up, and I myself become the food of worms? Shall I beget beings like myself, that they too may eat and drink and die, and leave behind them beings like themselves to do the same that I have done? To what purpose this ever-revolving circle, this ceaseless and unvarying round, in which all things appear only to pass away, and pass away only that they may re-appear unaltered; — this monster continually devouring itself that it may again bring itself forth, and bringing itself forth only that it may again devour itself?" (*, p. 53) ___ There is one further area in which the Objectivist ethics probably falls flat. Consider the words of the staunch atheist Mainländer: "One day, I witnessed how an old good lady visited an acquaintance, who had lost her husband a few days ago and was in a depressed state. As the old, withered, silver-haired lady said goodbye, she spoke: “Stay calm. God does not forsake the widows and orphans.” Not these words themselves moved and shook me: it was the sound of the voice, the tone of great determination, of the most unshakable faith, of unconditional trust; it was the glance of the blue eyes, that flashed light and then glowed calmly, brightly, mildly, peacefully again. (...) As religion gives the individual the marvelous trust, it gives it in the cloak of pretty delusion. It lures humans with a sweet image, which awakens in them the passionate desire and with the embrace of the marvelous illusion it crushes the fear of death away from his breast. He has contempt for the earthly life, to maintain a more beautiful heavenly life. (...) We live now in a period, where the blissful internalization by the continual decrease of faith becomes more and more rare, the unhappy groundlessness and peacelessness become more and more common: it is the period of inconsolable unbelief. Only the philosophy remains. Can she help? Can she, without a personal God and without a Kingdom of Heaven on the other side of the grave, give a motive, which internalizes, concentrates and thereby sprouts the blossom of the real trust, the unshakable peace of mind? Yes, she can; certainly, she can do it. She bases the trust upon pure knowledge, like religion grounded it upon faith." (*) Clearly, Leonard Peikoff does not agree with the words I bolded out, because in OPAR he says: "The ability to achieve values, I must add, is useless if one is stopped from exercising that ability—e.g., if an individual is caught in a dictatorship; or is suffering from a terminal illness; or loses an irreplaceable person essential to his very existence as a valuer, as may occur in the death of a beloved wife or husband. In such situations, suffering (or stoicism) is all that is possible." (Happiness as the Normal Condition of Man) So, it's safe to say that the Objectivist ethics does not advertise itself as something able to help you find happiness and meaning even at your worst. (For many people in the West and East, that aspect is still currently handled by religion.) Upon hearing about Leonard Peikoff's announcement that he has finally, after 8 decades of life, found true happiness, one member of this forum commented: "Peikoff describes himself as finally fully happy at age 81 (though I'm certain he must have enjoyed himself to some extent throughout his life), and he attributes this to having discovered what he "really wants to do in life" (as opposed to at least some portion of his work theretofore, which he "dreaded"). To me, in my life, such a thing is simply unacceptable. I would not want to wait until I'm 81 to be able to describe myself as "finally fully happy" and in fact I have not waited. Though I have challenges and setbacks from day to day, as I expect everyone must, and sometimes severe or lasting ones, I consider myself happy in all of the major areas of life." The takeaway of today's installment is that there are at least two areas where Objectivism openly does not promise much power: a). blows of fate, and b). overly-stringent personal criteria for happiness. Those whose ethics is based on the "pursuit of happiness" and "non-lifeboat scenarios", should remember the words of this Mesopotamian poem written 3 millennia ago: He who was alive yesterday is dead today. For a minute someone is downcast, then suddenly full of cheer. One moment he sings in exaltation, Another he groans like a professional mourner. The people's condition changes like opening and shutting [i.e. in a twinkling]. When starving they become like corpses, When sated they rival their gods. In good times they speak of scaling heaven When it goes badly, they complain of going down to hell. (*)

Conspiracy theorist.

After a failing to instigate a race war , Covid! But still not a majority , go figure

Lots of material about the debate or, more broadly, about the issues between them: albert ellis nathaniel branden debate - Search (bing.com) albert ellis nathaniel branden debate - Google Search

I had read the Ellis recounting of the debate within his general argument with the Objectivist philosophy in Is Objectivism a Religion? (1968) when it was new, just after having read Rand's literature and her philosophy. The title question is something one might ask of a philosophy, although one should really get on to other questions about a philosophy under the project announced and praised in the front flap of the jacket: a brilliant, smashing, no-holds-barred assessment of the objectivist [should be the proper noun Objectivist] philosophy." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2005 – 2nd ed.) has a brief characterization of the philosophy as in the category Popular Philosophy, of the sort that, though amateur (term not used in a derogatory way), considers the standard technical problems of philosophy. Notable philosophers from Descartes to Hume were technically in the class amateur. "Amateur philosophy as a genre is really a creation of the nineteenth century with its mass literacy and self-education. . . . Carlyle was a prophet rather than any sort of philosopher, as was Ruskin." (740). In the twentieth century, the number of amateur philosophers finding their way into print declined. One who did was "Ayn Rand, strenuous exponent of objectivism and self-interest" (ibid.). Fair enough for a brief mention. By now, of course, we have Blackwell's A Companion to Ayn Rand (2016) and other works by professional scholars on Rand's works and philosophy. These are extensive expositions and examinations of the philosophy. Albert Ellis was a clinical psychologist, and his interest in that is salient in his look at "Objectivist philosophy" in this book. His aim is to make out that Objectivism "is a religious movement rather than a rational, scientific, or empirically based philosophy" (293). His chapters cover: seeming rationalities of Objectivism (he favors rationality); Objectivist views on self-esteem, economics, and politics; extremism, dogmatism, absolutism, need for certainty, tautological and definitional thinking, intolerance of opposing views, deification and hero worship, unrealism and anti-empiricism; and condemning and punitive attitudes in Objectivism. Dr. Ellis did not seem able to get a grip on conceptual dependencies and would not seem promising for pursuing philosophy professionally. He sided with the divide of logic and existence championed in logical positivism, which had lately passed into the dustbin of history (which he likely did not know). By Ellis's report, the debate with N. Branden at the New Yorker hotel had about 1100 people in attendance, maybe 800 favoring Branden's side. In his book, Ellis's best (though inadequate) indictment of the philosophy for elements of religion that he despised, mostly rightly, was by relating audience behavior during the debate and connecting those unsavory behaviors of the largely Objectivist audience to teachings of Rand and Branden, definers of the philosophy. One item I remembered across my life concerning his report on that audience was not, in my estimation, stupid, shallow, or rah-rah. It warmed my heart. I had more soul-brothers and -sisters than I had imagined in something unusual and profound: "In the course of my initial presentation during the debate, I quoted Miss Rand's statement (from "The Objectivist Ethics") that 'happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions'. Could anyone ever be happy when held to this extreme standard? I asked. And scores of voices from the audience screamed back (somewhat to my surprise): Yes!!!" (294). The most serious advancement in understanding comes in written documents, not oral exchanges. Before the entrance of writing, there could be no Babylonian astronomy, no Greek harmonics, no Aristotle, no Euclid. In the next few days, oral arguments will be held at the US Supreme Court for landmark cases. The Justices will learn from the oral arguments. Great knowledge and skill will be on display. But the really momentous debate will be in the written briefs. Greetings, Skylark1

Jerry Liu offers the following advice, which fellow role-playing gamers will find easy to translate into real-life terms and quite memorable: Use your potions and scrolls. He opens with a familiar scenario:I find that when I play RPG games, I often hoard single-use items like potions and scrolls, saving them for some future critical moment. I finish games like Skyrim with a backpack full of unspent resources, reserved for a crisis that never actually arrives. What's the point, then, of all these items?The answer to his last question arrives from an experiment that it's probably fair to say went better than he expected:Recently I played Baldur's Gate 3 and I decided to try something new: I would actually gasp use my items as needed, as they were intended, without undue reservation. Not only was it actually fun to use my fireball scrolls and blow stuff up, but I also discovered new layers and hidden quests. For instance, using a 'Speak with the Dead' scroll on a certain suspicious corpse unveiled a questline I would have otherwise missed.Liu elaborates on his lesson, in the rest of his short, thought-provoking post. One insight worth remembering is that many things are actually not single-use -- although they can expire! Liu's backpack full of unused potions and scrolls reminds me of a related insight I had over years: Having a lot of something can, under certain conditions, be the functional equivalent of not having it at all. The germ of this one arose back in my card-playing undergraduate days, when I noticed that, depending on how one played long in a suit, one could opt to stay in a lead or basically sit out the rest of a hand. My huge supply of, say, diamonds, might mean noone could lead me into diamonds (or take them) because they were all in my hand. That ring is in there somewhere, but good luck finding it! (Image by Arthur Rackham, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)This isn't always helpful: Decades later, after a series of interstate moves that included young children in tow and no purging for several years, I remember looking for something in a garage full of disorganized stuff and unopened boxes. I can't recall what I was looking for at the time, but even though I knew we had multiple instances of it, I had to buy another because everything was lost in the disorganized dragon's hoard that our garage housed instead of our cars. Leading up to our last move, I attacked that hoard over a period of three months. We donated dozens of boxes of things to Goodwill, and lots of that stuff was brand new, or as good as new. Until I did that, it was as if we didn't have a garage -- or most of the things that were being stored in it! The clearing-out caused moving preparations to take longer than I would have liked, but I did not want to have the same situation on the other end. I wanted to enjoy this house! That was time well-spent, but looking back to Liu's advice again, it is clear that, had I not had to deal with this mess, I could have used a big chunk of time for much more interesting things. -- CAVLink to Original

Ellis's part of the debate was a synopsis of his criticisms in that book. The book is his angry version. Well, thanks anyway. By the way, a PDF of Is Objectivism a Religion? is available for free reading online.

Probably not. They had a contract whereby either one could veto written or recorded dissemination of the contents, and Branden chose to invoke his veto, explaining his reasons in The Objectivist. Branden also said that Is Objectivism a Religion was the material Ellis prepared for the debate, so it should give a good idea of his thinking on the topic.

The consequences were foreseeable and written in plain text by Objectivists right after 9/11.

For a friend.

Their ruminations on consciousness and awareness. I'm extremely attracted to Advaita Vedanta.

I think Trump was hoodwinked into implementing anti-freedom/private property policies and expanding military/government powers as response to Covid. What part of the job of POTUS did Trump perform evilly?

Producing things of objective value is unconditionally a virtue. Not everything created is an objective value (example: Das Kapital; Mein Kampf). Keeping with the context of Trump as our Supreme Leader, it is irrelevant whether he produces value in real estate, since the job of POTUS is to execute the laws of the United States, not to manipulate the economy or make a profit off of real estate deals. Applying the relevant criteria, Trump is an anti-virtue, as president.

Thank you, Monart, for that possibility that "Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification" could be restatements of Rand's corollary axiom from the axiom "Existence exists", her corollary axiom "that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." Yes, "Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification" can be a restatement of her corollary axiom, but I'd say that in the restatement the status as corollary axiom is lost, and in this particular restatement, Rand is moving on to a further important and grand exposition of ontology and philosophy of mind. Rand's notion of such a thing as a "corollary axiom" was an innovation. The closest thing to it I've found is something we could notice when following Euclid in geometry. After reading his axioms, postulates, and definitions, one could step back and realize "I'm going to need means of drawing and a straightedge and a compass to make the labeled diagrams required to do these ensuing demonstrations." That is only an analogy with Rand's stepping back after the assertion "Existence exists." In philosophy, there is a similarity with Descartes's movement of mind as susceptible to deception to existence of human mind. Aquinas had mentioned that move, but not in a context of Descartes-like description of or excuse for pretended super-duper state of doubt by a sane mind. Descartes's move is backwards in our order of knowing: One already has to know one exists to follow (pretend along with Descartes) the exercises of the MEDITATIONS. So that is not really much similarity in fundamental moves between Rand and Descartes. That Rand has axioms is like Spinoza, but the likeness does not amount to much. Spinoza does not have something like "corollary axiom". He is using axioms from which to deduce further propositions. That was not Rand's use of axioms and not her program. She was using 'Existence exists and is Identity' as a touchstone for right thought and right inquiry and as bar to metaphysics of being that had been crafted by the Arabs and Latins to have a niche in being for existence of God of the sort in which they had faith. Also a bar against radical epistemological skepticism. She was not using 'Existence exists and is identity', and 'consciousness is fundamentally consciousness of existence and is identification' as a basis for proving further propositions. I have not included in the present presentation the axiomatic aspect that my metaphysics can take on (which is detailed in my paper "Existence, We"). Like Rand, my program is at odds with Descartes and with Spinoza. Although I don't go into the possibility in this monograph of axiomatic structure being lain on my metaphysics, my invocation of the character of examples and counterexamples per se in arguing for the necessity of my categories resonates with Rand's efforts to prove that existence requires identity (efforts along the lines of Aristotle in defending the Principle of (Non)Contradiction).

My grasp of the integrated mind-body improvement of one's health and the self-realization of one's purpose through rational, productive living in consonance with objective reality, is satisfying and sufficient to link my self to Existence. In your quest, what in Vedic philosophies attracts you?

So, you explain that "Existence is Identity", and "Consciousness is Identification" are not exactly condensed re-statements of “...something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists”? I understood it as being such, since Rand, a few paragraphs later, writes, "...the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification." You explain why this isn't a re-statement, but a more derivative inference. I'll continue to reflect on that.

Over at Reason, John Stossel notes that "The Labor Department just imposed 300 pages of new regulations to reclassify many individual contractors as payroll employees." Great. I guess that's why our tax preparer had all sorts of questions about gig work for us this year. Naturally, news media uncritically parrot the administration's alleged justifications for the changes, despite the fact that, as Stossel reminds us, this terrible idea has already been tried and failed in California:Four years ago, unions got then-Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D -- San Diego) to push through a new law that reclassified gig workers. They were told they'd get higher wages, overtime, and other benefits. Clueless media liked that. Vox called the law "a victory for workers everywhere." Ha! A few months later, Vox media laid off hundreds of freelancers. "They expected that all these companies were going to reclassify independent contractors as employees," freelance musician Ari Herstand told me. "In reality, they're just letting them go!" Herstand was dismayed to learn that when he wants other musicians to join him, he could no longer just write them a check. "I have to put that drummer on payroll, W2 him, get workers' comp insurance, unemployment insurance, payroll taxes!" he complains. "I have to hire a payroll company." [links omitted]Stossel also notes correctly that (a) some professions managed to get exemptions in California, and (b) Biden wants to make that law nationwide and without exemptions. Never mind that it was so unpopular that even Californians partially clawed it back at the ballot box. It's too bad that the best we can hope for in the next election is divided government. The Democrats would ram this down our throats if left unchecked. The cash value of Trump "owning the libs" through easily-overturned means is zero. Case in point: Keystone XL never got built. (Image by Office of the President of the United States, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)And the Republicans? I seriously doubt that the current iteration of the Republican Party will do anything positive to protect gig work, much less roll back the regulatory state that makes moves like this possible: They'll be too busy infighting, or pursuing a theocratic and xenophobic agenda to worry about such unfashionable things as a free economy. Maybe -- if he wins and he feels like it, and as he did for some things during his term -- Trump will roll back the new regulations, as if the Democrats will never come back into power again. Spoiler alert: When they do, a future Democrat can reintroduce these regulations or worse. (For an example from the world of Executive Orders, see also: The Keystone XL Pipeline.) And that last, Trump supporters, is what is known as "owning" the libs without defeating them. -- CAVLink to Original

Correction of * link in preceding post.

These Hours of Radiant Existence* This is the philosophy I created, my life work. This presentation is only the length of a monograph, not a book. There are here no scholarly citations and references or thick setting of my philosophy in the history of philosophy, unlike my usual compositions. It is just straight reading of the philosophy I developed and hold for true. I thank Walter my wonderful for doing all he could throughout our interval these last decades to support my study and writing of philosophy. The ten short chapters in this monograph are: I. Existence II. Other III. Divisions of Existence IV. Entities V. Passage VI. Situation VII. Character VIII. Science and Mathematics IX. Logic X. Mortal Life and Value ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I expect to return shortly to completing my compositions in progress here at Objectivism Online, including: Necessity and Form in Truth / On The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, / Kelley's Kant / Dewey and Peikoff on Kant's Responsibility / Honesty / Sacrifice