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If you want to cite Randian authority, the place to look is The Cashing-in: the Student 'Rebellion'. There she writes about the situations where one can properly break the law. One of these, she says (and tradition agrees), is to bring a test-case. He waited to be arrested. He never denied his part. He was willing to go to jail if the verdict didn't go his way. His case is more broadly symbolic than a challenge to a single law would have been, but it counts just the same.

A vote for Harris will mean increasing censorship, increasing regulation, and decreasing scope for individual rights. And that's just for starters. The Left feels entitled to their own "facts," and they are willing to impose their "facts" by force. They are unwilling to compromise. They are willing to smash the existing system to make room for their new one. They will continue to use censorship to conceal any evidence that they are wrong (or evil). Anybody who disagrees with them will be treated the way the medieval Church treated heretics. The burden of proof will always be on the heretic. (By contrast, the fundamentalists on the Right are a shrinking minority, who still find it necessary to compromise in order to get elected. The Right as a whole is still influenced by Locke; I think the spirit of Locke, unidentified, is what the conservatives are trying to conserve.) I think the Left is unlikely to leave abortion to a woman's individual choice, since they oppose individual choice in regard to literally everything else, except when such choices can be forced on others at the expense of the recognition of reality. They'll figure out a way to make abortion their choice, not the woman's; they'll probably oppose abortion when it's sensible and only support it when it's absurd. The Left will alter the Constitution or interpret it out of existence, so that they can stay in power with no accountability. Once they are firmly in power, there will be no legal obstacles to totalitarianism. Or you can vote for Trump.

No. No. No. The theme of The Fountainhead is not political. Roark's dynamiting of Cortlandt is in the name of all creators and all real integrity. The fiction rolls on to its purpose and experience, details of law at the time brushed aside with little diligence or care by a writer's keeping focus of tuned readers on her concern in the fictional work, which is not law. In real cases, juries sift matters of fact and their fit or misfit with acts addressed in law. This jury in the Cortland case is deciding between an alternative of moral ideals. It is Man on trial. That is the significance of Wynand at the back of the courtroom. Such stuff, fictions and moved readers are made of.

I direct your attention to this thread which bears on your question. Let me also remind you that while we tend to take all of Rand’s writings as interchangeable without regard for time context, Rand started writing The Fountainhead in the mid-30’s whereas her non-fiction works built on Atlas Shrugged decades later. The question of what you call the act is irrelevant, the right question is “Was the act morally proper?”. Rand is very clear in her later philosophical writings that in a civilized society, man cedes his right to defensive force to the government, and a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. Roark should have sought forceful government intervention, as required by law. There are numerous imaginary scenarios that could be applied to the effect that this principle does not apply. For instance, one could conclude that Roark was not living in a civilized society, he was living in the wild, wild west of Medieval Mongolia where dog eats dog. The same can be said about all stages in US history, that we are not and have not ever been an Objectivist utopia, yet it remains invalid to argue “Because society is imperfect, all forms of force are sanctioned”. A more realistic argument would be based on the reality of civil judgments and breach of contract – I pointed this out earlier. A money judgment would not result in justice, only removal of the offending object would. It is not obvious to me whose property rights were violated, since we are dealing with a subcontract. Keating breached his contract with Roark, as well as with Cortland (the contract was for a building, not a pile of rubble). Roark’s action was against Keating, who remains responsible for the creation of the final building. If we take Cortland out of the picture, Keating had to right to the building that he created, but this is an extrajudicial act of force, of taking the law into your own hands. The law is not a suicide pact. My opinion is that the trial outcome is as implausible, in the real world, as the alternative where the court orders the demolition of the building. The issue that is not clearly worked out in Rand’s philosophy is under what circumstances may we properly assume that we are not living in a civilized society – when is it proper to ignore the law? The public safety regulation argument is a red herring. There is no evdence that blowing up the building threatened anyone’s safety. FYI, no legislative solution would have been valid (it would have at most created an avenue for blowing up future buildings). The courts could have insisted on specific performance, but that is a purely surreal legal possibility, not one that actually exists. Also, “rights” and “force” are not the same thing (or, exact opposites), your argument should be focused on what Rand said about an individual using force. Roark’s rights were patently violated. Roark used force in response to Keating forcefully violating his rights. It is correct that individuals do not have the right to retaliatory force.

Objectivism is in the hard atheism school of thought, provided that you agree that I am not God. Given the defining properties of said God, particularly omnipotence, no such entity can exist – that entails a logical contradiction. Objectivism is agnostic as to the existence of life on other planets. It is conceptually possible, after all life exists on this planet and we are not hyper-concrete-bound. You left out a significant third category, namely the class of arbitrary claims, for which there is not even conceptual supporting evidence. A number of mystical beings such as Superman and Thor do not entail logical contradictions, but there is not a shred of evidence for their existence, hence claiming that Thor exists (other that "as mythical construct") is arbitrary. We also reject claims lacking in evidence, in other words you have to subdivide “insufficient” evidence into “not enough” vs. “none at all”. Also bear in mind that all evidence is grounded in perception of reality, so the ability to say “I can imagine…” does not constitute evidence.

Resources implies a solution, so let’s drop the search for resources for a while. To find a solution to any problem, you first have to understand what the problem is, so let’s focus first on stating what the problem is. The problem is that there exists an ideology which threatens our existence, what needs to happen is elimination of the threat. There are two ways to address the threat. One is to eliminate the ideology, the other is to contain the threat: these are not mutually exclusive choices. The ideology in question is not Islam per se, it is religion, what is special about Islam is that it is rather extreme both in practice and theory compared to evangelical Christianity. Another dangerous ideology is altruism, also epistemological nihilism, so we should also be addressing those threats. With a focus on ideology rather than social divisions, we should address those ideas which are most in need of confrontation. At a practical level, this means addressing the extant bad ideologies and educating people as to why those ideologies are bad and what ideologies are good. At an extremely specific level, that might mean making a donation of $100 to ARI, or else just discussing philosophical ideas with your neighbor in the hop of getting them to reconsider their widely applied emotional “I don’t want…” method of deciding political questions. Just as I think it is useless to try to reason with the leader of the extreme leftist woke mob, it is useless to calmly discuss ethics with the Supreme Leader of the Taliban. The containment approach is similar to the policy of tolerance that the US has pursued w.r.t. foreign aggressors. As long as Russia or China do not invade US territory, we will put up with their evil conduct, sort of. We may end up engaging in a futile act of self-sacrifice as a form of theater, such as the Vietnam War or the more recent Middle East engagements, where we demonstrated our willingness to make huge ceremonial sacrifices without a firm resolve to eliminate the underlying evil. Thus we could decide to engage in a decades-long land war with Iran so that we can demonstrate our resolve (though not demonstrate what we are committed to accomplishing). The policy of containment is slightly effective at addressing nation-on-nation aggression. Utterly-diffused ideological aggression, i.e. terrorism, is a very different problem, and poses a special massive threat, that of self-destruction. To eliminate terrorism, we must somehow identify (and neutralize) the terrorists, but who are they? Well, in this specific instance, they adhere to a particular religion, a minority religion in the US, so one approach is to neutralize all people who are (directly or indirectly) from a region that predominantly adheres to that religion. If we abandon the concept of individual rights, we might impose a policy which presumes that anyone from the Middle East or North Africa is likely to be a terrorist. In adopting such a policy, we will have lost the real battle. This is what makes terrorism such a huge threat to existence qua man, that we cannot effectively use force to root it out. We may be able to reduce the severity of the threat by dlligent security measures. But the only way to eliminate the threat is by effective use of reason, to eliminate the ideology that causes terrorism.

If you limit the inquiry to modern Western nations, it’s pretty clear that we should make of it the fact that our historical underpinning is Roman Catholicism, which has strongly opposed suicide as a sin, the unnatural destruction of a holy gift from God. About half of those nations are rigorously Catholic, and even strongly Protestant nations like Norway emerged somewhat from the cloud of Catholicism only recently. In fact, the difference between Catholics and Protestants is much less than it used to be (cf. the decline in the Protestant doctrine sola fide). However, despite being the launching pad for global Christianity, modern Western nations lead the world in cancelling the crime of suicide, befitting the general tendency of those nations to not legally enforce locally-dominant religious doctrines. The current “line in the sand” for Western nations involves assisted suicide: you can kill yourself, if you can manage to do it yourself, but you cannot get help from anyone (there being spotty exceptions where assisted suicide can be legal). There probably is a deeper religious undercurrent to these laws, where the “sanctity of life” creates not just a right to live but an obligation to live, and it’s only in seriously blue states in the US that there is a recognized right to assisted suicide (and to have an abortion). So taking a more global perspective, the absolute and unconditional right to die is almost entirely non-existent, the apparent exception being Germany (where there is apparently a legal vacuum because a prior law was ruled to be unconstitutional). The most you can hope for is a conditional pragmatic right to hasten the inevitable rather than endure years of suffering, and even that requires you to manage your own death entirely. While we can attribute legal restrictions against suicide to religion, you should note that the criminalization of suicide in North Korea is based on the premise that it constitutes treason – not a religious rationale.

One of my many big complaints about Donald Trump and Republicans who follow his lead is that he is fundamentally no different than a Democrat. For example, see "Harris and Trump Offer a Clear Contrast on the Economy" (but don't be fooled by the title) for a good summary of the candidates' superficially different, anti-freedom economic positions. The blurb put it much better: Both candidates embrace expansions of government power to steer economic outcomes -- but in vastly different areas. Trump's similarity to the left emphatically includes being a thin-skinned, petulant, self-pitying whiner, as he has been ever since he lost in 2020, and now seems in danger of doing again this time around. Were I running against him, I'd label him the Orange Snowflake, and it would stick. Yaron Brook contrasts how Trump ran in 2016 with how he's running now. As I post, John Stossel's Election Betting Odds site rates Trump's and Harris's chances of winning at 46 and 52 percent, respectively on a razor-thin Electoral College margin. This is in large part because Trump, rather than allowing Harris to paint herself as the nutty radical that she is, is allowing himself to be flustered and bloviate about it, rather than making a case to persuadable voters or even simply zipping his lid. Dan Hannon of the Washington Examiner says this far better than I, in "Instead of Sulking, Republicans Should Ditch Their Own Dud Candidate":To accuse former President Donald Trump of being petulant is like accusing a cow of being bovine or a butterfly of being flighty. His toddlerlike self-absorption, for reasons that continue to elude me, does not bother his working-class base. But even his supporters generally recognize that a certain boastful sulkiness is part of his brand. Even so, the tetchy way in which he has reacted to the replacement of President Joe Biden by Vice President Kamala Harris is spectacularly self-defeating. In his rambling interview with Elon Musk, Trump peevishly referred to the removal of Biden as "a coup," echoing his vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who has repeatedly used the same phrase. [links omitted]Upon noting the misuse of the word coup, Hannon suggests that, rather than complain about the Democrats changing course, the Republicans ought to do the same, and offers the following worthy (if not compelling) rationale:[In 2016, Trump won] against a spectacularly hopeless Democrat -- and even then, he lost the popular vote. Sure, Trump might turn out some people who would not vote for other Republicans. But we are looking here at the net impact, the ratio of soccer moms lost to bearded mountain men gained. When you compare Trump's figures to those of downballot Republicans, there is no doubt he is a drag on the ticket. The reason the betting markets are now predicting a Harris win is they can see what Trump supporters won't, namely that, while his support has a high floor, it also has a low ceiling. ... Now, you might argue that Harris is far from being a normal Democrat, that her fringe views and inability to string a sentence together put her in the unelectable category. I wrote here last month about her far-left economic opinions. Her radical stances on identity politics would take up another entire column. This is the politician who backed gender surgery for minors, who refers to Hispanic people by the hideous term "Latinx," and who urged her supporters to post bail for Black Lives Matter rioters. But that is precisely the point. Against any other Republican candidate [save Vance --ed], Harris would be toast. On some level, almost all Republican strategists know it. But they quail before their primary voters, refuse to defend their principles, and, in the last analysis, turn on those who, such as Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney, stand by the convictions that all Republicans used to profess. [links omitted, bold added]Hannon all but says what I have thought even before Harris was nominated. This election would be a golden opportunity for a decent, pro-liberty candidate, but the parties seem intent on betting that the other is so horrible, that its trash candidate can win, anyway. My advice: Do what the Dems did, just this once -- and forevermore offer a real, pro-liberty alternative to the American voter. -- CAVLink to Original

If there is anyone here who thinks that they personally are not going to die, I invite you to wake up and reignite a thing most primitive in humans which is a fundamental object of their love, of your love: truth. You are going do die. Depend on it. You are not only not going be productive to age 150, you and I, like Socrates and Rand, are going to die probably before age 100. I mean we shall stop existing and not exist through all future time beyond our death. (We shall not pass through any time beyond our death because we shall not exist.) That we lived and what that life consisted of is part of the past through all future time. I mean the fact of our interval of existence. I don't mean that recognition of the fact will continue through all future time. One of God's jobs was to remember you through all time, but God failed to exist. The full explicit acceptance of the fact that you will be falling apart into nonexistence forever can be refreshing and cleansing, rather like figuring out that God does not exist, even though God had been the thing you loved most up until your realization that It did not exist. Most of us will be entirely forgotten by eight decades after death. It's OK. That we lived can be enough satisfaction. One's finite life was its own purpose and significance. Only in human lives are there any long purposes, and any significance in the universe is in such living things. One lived and was a being that made its own existence and perhaps made likenesses of one's kind (children), made one's own essence and distinctive principles, one's own kind of necessity and unity because: one was life itself and life become highly conscious. The thought that one will reach a last day of life and cease to exist can be terrifying, and I think keeping that terror at bay (in a psychotic way) is a main reason for some major religions, as well as sci-fi projections of never having that day come to one. It will come, and I have a third poem in this vicinty I'd like to also share in this thread: Once Against all hours, days, devisings, radiant axe and warming fire: Pulse and grasp cease you. You stillness gone from streams of light, space and time, gone to snow once touched your flushed face, to crester-stone once glanced the pond, to pond, its laps of shore, their sum, to ice ceiling once you stood upon, to sky once above all your loves.

The present Democratic Party has had a radical shift. "Socialism" now, is "the real thing", well beyond a pale semblance of yesterday's 'soft socialism'. (I know some Americans and roughly kept up with events over there). The Party is not in the slightest comparable with what it was; as some friends deserting the party say, "unrecognizable", with the JFK, or for that matter, Goldwater, era. Also my firm position has been that any "issues" (like abortion rights), are and ought to be subsumed under uncompromised individual rights. Promoting other "rights" in isolation is detrimental to that objective - ultimately to the pro rata "rights", also. The Republican support ~could~ one day fully accept individual rights, the hard Left will never.

So it has a name. Cloward-Piven. The insidious movement by a relatively minor element to take control over America, signs of which I have been noticing for ten years, on the outside. It's now time to get over the personalities, "style" and foibles and even stated "policies", of the next possible leader and to return to fundamentals and get priorities straight. What do they represent? Simply, I see two terms of a Democrat in office producing a Socialist White House. While not yet a dominant 'socialist USA', for there will be stern resistance. "Clearly, lesser evil than Trump": this zero-to-hero candidate, the attractively giggling Kamala, having been obviously primed, rehearsed and groomed for live appearances , if successful, would be under firm control of her far-Left puppet-masters, I have no doubt. The power of the media has elevated her in the matter of weeks and would go on playing soft ball with her afterwards. ( I admit my single lasting impression of Harris, happily enthusing in interview about the BLM riots (sorry, "protests") - and that they must continue throughout those elections. This, an AG, on the side of law and order, stoking up disorder or violence for the political dividends?) The luxury of a moral, political choice has all but disappeared, turned into "emergency ethics".

I'd never heard of this one, so I'm relying on Wikipedia. Objectivism has never much bought into the necessary / contingent distinction, so we wouldn't expect them to have much to say about its consequences. To judge from what the article says, it looks like a version of the familiar philosophical mistake of treating being, the universe, what is and the like as if it were a particular entity. Thus, people figure, it must have a beginning in time, a boundary in space and (most notoriously) a distinct entity that brought it about, when none of these follow. Applying the principle to this argument, we can imagine that a particular being didn't come about, but not being itself.

What David said. And we have American at-home terrorists, such as the guy who decided to attack what he regarded as an evil US federal government by blowing up the Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City (the city where I was born and raised). The culprit was duly apprehended, tried, and executed. But, as David said, the cure at the root is instillation of individual rationality, the far reach of rationality, and love of it in one's thinking and actions. On this day 23 years ago, I lived in Chicago, and I was studying my Kant for the morning, when my younger sister in Oklahoma called me and said "Turn on your television. There is suicide attack using airliners in New York and DC." As I put down the phone, I thought to myself: "This is international. Bin Laden." We had known he was out to attack us, but we had not been successful in our attempts to kill him first. That evening I raised the American flag I had inherited from my brother from the balcony of our second-floor apartment in a 19th century grey-stone in the old German district in Chicago. I knew that our forces would be going to the other side of the world to get him and his gang. On the day we killed Bin Laden, I again raised that flag, this time from our native trees near the road on the acreage to which we had retired near the Blue Ridge mountains. Do not tread on the United States of America.* Bottom line: What David said.

For example, certain politicians (elected and self-appointed) have manufactured an "immigration crisis", we also have or have had a manufactured "gas crisis", "housing crisis", "healthcare crisis", "employment crisis" and "weather crisis". The promise of crisis management is what sustains politicians.

Springfield may be technically “civilized”, living according to the law of the land, but the law itself is contradictory. The contradiction arises from a change in the concept of “rights”, from the original “right to act”, to a “right to have”, according to which various benefits have become “rights” on a par with the right to own property. In aid of clarity, I will distinguish between mandated public entitlements (benefits) versus proper rights. A simple economic equation is that entitlements come at a substantial cost, payable only by violation of rights. Citizens seem to be willing to silently shoulder this burden, as long as it is not noticeable, where the government manages the contradiction so that people do not notice the degradation of the proper function of government or increases in taxes. The local government cannot increase property taxes ad libitum which is why people tend to have some awareness of tax increases. Springfield is not some upper-class woke suburb, it’s headed the direction of Cairo IL. The federal Family Reunification Parole program partially recognizes a right (one denied by some Objectivists) to pursue one’s self-interest free from force, a right that is arbitrarily denied under federal law in the case of people who are not US citizens. When I say “partially”, I mean that a select set of people have been allowed to exercise the right to enter the US, but otherwise they are denied fundamental rights. Most notable is the right to trade ones labor for things of value – to hold a job. Those admitted under humanitarian parole do not have the right to hold a job though they can conditionally request permission to work, which leads to substantial bureaucratic delays (for example, asylum-seekers cannot even apply until they have been waiting for 150 days). The universal social safety net has created a new means of survival, one not proper to man’s existence: “Ask and you shall receive – we will sacrifice others for your sake”. Three factors result in the sudden increase in Haitian immigrants in that part of Ohio. First, there is the perennial “stay with uncle Bob” factor, that immigrants prefer to move to a place where they have some social connection which is why Starbuck MN has so many people of Norwegian ancestry, and why Minnesota and Ohio have the nation’s highest Somali populations. “Stay with uncle Bob” contemporarily becomes a near legal requirement, because the sponsoring relative must guarantee the financial support of the beneficiary, and housing is the biggest expense for immigrants. You can rest assured that the implications of that guarantee are systematically ignored. Second, Haiti has been in a perpetual state of dictatorship and collapse for all of modern history, to the point that there is literally no government in Haiti for a year (or more). This is what explains the immediate substantial influx. It is trivial to generate social media sensations, the number of false / wildly-exaggerated wing-nut claims about horrifying behavior on Nextdoor is legendary. Most people do not understand the concept of rights, so they will explode emotionally over something unfamiliar, like “people not speaking English” as though that is equivalent to trespass which is an actual violation of rights. Whether or not local governments are “inundanted” with improper police calls is a question of fact, so far there is no evidence of actual overwhelming. There is, on the other hand, substantial evidence that this situation is being used by governments to justify expansion of government power, where the state pumps relief (money and police) into Springfield, but that then becomes a platform for demands for more federal “assistance”.

Correction: apparently it was dated Tuesday, so it was a few hours before the debate. Still, this is the sort of thing the Democrats will censor off of Facebook and YouTube, and then they will claim on NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN that it never happened, and that anyone who believes it is crazy.

Editor's Note: We're keeping a sharp eye on Tropical Storm Francine in these parts. Posting may be irregular due to storm-related contingencies. Thank you for your patience. *** With the usual caveat that small-L libertarian is at best only an approximate description of my political philosophy, let me commend you to a very interesting post at Bryan Caplan's Substack, "DeAngelis Generalized." Within, Caplan analyzes how education reform advocate Corey DeAngelis has helped move the needle towards such reforms as school choice at the state level across America -- and suggests generalizing the strategy to achieve other expansions of freedom. And what strategy is that? Caplan puts it as follows:Image by Jeffrey Hamilton, via Unsplash, license.In The Parent Revolution, Corey DeAngelis argues that the key variable was a change in strategy. Stop trying to persuade your enemies. Instead, redouble your efforts on your friends. ... In Red States: Push pro-freedom policies with conservative appeal using conservative rhetoric. Stop pushing pro-freedom policies with primarily progressive appeal. In Blue States: Push pro-freedom policies with progressive appeal using progressive rhetoric. Stop pushing pro-freedom policies with primarily conservative appeal. I know "stop pushing pro-freedom policies" never sounds good to libertarians. But the logic is sound. Resources are finite. Energy is finite. Friendship is finite. So use your resources, energy, and friendship in whatever way gets you the freest bang for your buck. [links omitted]This DeAngelis did in response to the fact that, for example, in red states, appeals to Democrats weren't getting GOP holdouts to budge, while also failing to persuade Democrats to go against a major constituency (e.g., teachers unions). The good of this is that it is a brilliant application of reframing to a political strategy Ayn Rand once recommended in her 1972 essay, "What Can One Do?"The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree. In such cases, no one may attempt to ascribe his views to the entire membership, or to use the group to serve some hidden ideological purpose (and this has to be watched very, very vigilantly).The groups seeking such measures as school choice may well often fit into such criteria. Interestingly, Rand warned, in the previous paragraph of the same essay against the possible bad:... Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to "do something." By "ideological" (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g., the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the "libertarian" hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. (For a discussion of the reasons, see "The Anatomy of Compromise" in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)In the context of Caplan's post, what does all of this mean for an advocate of liberty? Be sure you judge a given measure to be pro-freedom and why, and if the opportunity presents itself, advocate a better version of it or help others see how it might fit into a larger pro-freedom picture. Rand did this in her 1972 essay, "Tax Credits for Education":I want to stress that I am not an advocate of public (i.e., government-operated) schools, that I am not an advocate of the income tax, and that I am not an advocate of the government's "right" to expropriate a citizen's money or to control his spending through tax incentives. None of these phenomena would exist in a free economy. But we are living in a disastrously mixed economy, which cannot be freed overnight. And in today's context, the above proposal would be a step in the right direction, a measure to avert an immediate catastrophe.In addition, she explained at length in other work why she repudiated the Libertarian Party. The strategy Caplan outlines is brilliant, but comes with the hazard of being wasted by "pro-liberty" elements that are less than fastidious in their thinking and propose policies that might seem pro-liberty, but not be, or that are not timely. (Some drug "legalization" attempts come to mind as an example of the latter: If addicts don't get punished for real crimes (such as trespassing) or pay for their own medical expenses, such an "experiment in freedom" will backfire and lend surface credibility to the idea that drugs should be prohibited.) That said, today's left-right tribalism is a significant impediment to loosening the grip of the leviathan welfare state. This approach looks like it could alleviate the problem by leveraging the prejudices of each side to buy more time (in the form of slightly more freedom) for the cultural change that will need to occur before the politics can fundamentally improve. -- CAVLink to Original

This statement is attributed to Diogenes Laërtius in Book 5 of Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων (Lives of Eminent Philosophers)[20] “τὸ ἀνεπιτάκτως ποιεῖν ἅ τινες διὰ τὸν ἀπὸ τῶν νόμων φόβον ποιοῦσιν”. The English translation of that by R. D. Hicks is “(When asked what advantage he had ever gained from philosophy, he replied) ‘This, that I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law’”. Insofar as there is over a 600 year gap between the two and Diogenes Laërtius is not generally held to be a very reliable author, there is not a strong reason to think that Aristotle actually said this. At least we know it is not just a modern meme.

It seems to happen a lot that a quotation is attributed to a famous person to draw attention and to lend a (fallacious) air of authority. My favorite example is a quotation I like very much. "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force, and, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master." This is usually attributed to George Washington. However, the earliest actual appearance anyone can find seems to be around 1900.

Do you have a citation for the Aristotle quote - i.e. a particular location in his writings? Google and Bing find others who have quoted the words but none (in a quick perusal) who tell us where he said it. He wasn't much for first-person statements. He might say, e.g. By 'F' I mean... as an alternative phrasing of The definition of 'F' is..., but he didn't go in for autobiography. If the statement means that performing a particular act voluntarily is more desirable than performing it under legal duress, it's true in some cases, such as not killing or lying. At the same time, people do a lot under legal duress that wouldn't be admirable if they did it freely, such as paying for the UN or for political indoctrination in the schools.

I have to point out this article (by Dr. Michael Hurd, who is now writing on Newsmax): https://www.newsmax.com/michaelhurd/price-controls-putin/2024/09/05/id/1179188/

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law. Aristotle

At one point Cortlandt is referred to as a Federal Housing Project, so presumably it was the federal government. Also, it was made clear that suing to enforce the contract would mean suing the government.

I cannot even begin to imagine how you reach that conclusion. Retaliatory force is where you beat someone as punishment for having violated your rights. Self defense is different from retaliation. Self defense is force that is immediately necessary to terminate an act of violence, retaliation is post-hoc and applied when the threat of continued force no longer exists.

When the government willfully refuses to perform its proper rights-protecting function and flagrantly tolerates the initiation of force against individuals, the government has lost its legitimacy. In that case, the society has slipped back to its primitive pre-civilization state. This occurred in Somalia, Central Africa, South Sudan, Libya, Yemen. When the fundamental premise of “civilized society” is false, Rand’s moral prescriptions are different, because they are predicated on a society where man acts according to his proper nature, not a society where men act like savage beats. One cannot morally condemn a man for using whatever means necessary to survive, in such a society. However, we are referring here to objective facts – willfully refusing to function, flagrantly tolerating initiation of force. A government may also fail in an instance to punish an initiation of force, for example because there was insufficient evidence to objectively establish that there was a crime (dispute over the actual property owner) or to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the accused did the deed. To be concrete, we can know for certain that Smith did the deed, but because the evidence against him was secured by beating a witness, Smith cannot be convicted: we say that Smith “got off on a technicality”. In that case, is vigilante justice against Smith morally proper? Following Rand’s statements on the matter, it is not, because in a civilized society we cede the right to use retaliatory force to objective law, and the objective law says that a man cannot be convicted by evidence illegally and immorally obtained by governmental initiation of force. Depolicing is, in fact, sort of legal, which is in my opinion a huge problem. The courts have deemed that the government is never compelled to enforce the law, though if some action of depolicing were to systematically run afoul of the 14th Amendment – i.e. refusing to investigate crimes against black people – that action would be deemed illegal. To the extent that the circumstances are the same, the government must treat all people the same way. This does mean that the government can refuse to investigate property crimes involving less than a $500 loss, since that defines an objective “circumstance”. Police discretion to ignore crimes is, frankly, egregious, and it is a substantial political issue in some places. At the same time, some $%(*#@ hacked my credit card, and the police have not done anything about it because, realistically, there is nothing they can do, this was not a willful and flagrant refusal to protect my rights.

Roark exists in a world without John Galt, in a world without Ayn Rand, in a world which had not discovered Objectivism, and also Rand had not completed her philosophy to the point one could call it Objectivism... that likely happened during the writing of Atlas. It would be unlikely then that Roark would know Objectivism or act completely in accordance therewith. He does at least in some respects have a sense of life akin to an Objectivist, at least in some realms of action and thought. That said, even IF Rand had completed her philosophy beforehand, say had written The Fountainhead after Atlas, there would be little reason to write another character who was a perfect Objectivist and in fact one might argue, it would be inappropriate to the vision and purpose of that new work, while John Galt is the appropriate character for Atlas any other work requires some different character. An artist creates admirable and unadmirable characters with strengths, quirks, and shortcomings which may change over time, but focuses primarily on a plot which illustrates the person's character in action and the consequences of those actions i.e. illustrates relationships between a person's identity and his actions, and his actions and reality. There is no need for any protagonist in any book outside of Atlas to perfectly exemplify the entirety of Rand's philosophical and moral framework... that would be another book with a John Galt... what her aim would have been (I conjecture) is to write a different story in which a different protagonist is simply someone different, and the actions and events flow from the virtues and vices of the characters in a way which is compelling and meaningful, and hopefully he learns something along the way (or at least the reader does). EDIT: I am of the view that Roark did not act rationally in that moment but acted passionately. It was more than punching a man in the face for insulting one's wife... but I take it in that vein. He is not a perfect Objectivist, but he is a great character... a pattern which I find very true in the real world as well.

I have followed Suzanne Lucas's business writing for quite some time, and first heard of her because of her humorous alias, The Evil HR Lady. But after nearly twenty years of writing, she has decided to rebrand, and gives her reasons. This one resonates strongly with me, since it is a welcome change from the tone that dominates so much commentary these days:Exhausted? Try this. (Image by Nathan Dumlao, via Unsplash, license.)I want to be more positive I definitely have strong opinions and am not scared to share them, but I'm not at all interested in dividing the world. I firmly believe that most people are good people trying their best. I wanted a brand that focused on the good rather than on division. I wanted to focus on making things better, not just pointing out what was wrong. The name "Improve Your HR" focuses on making things better. Life is tough out there. HR should make both business owners' and employees' lives easier--that's what good HR does. I want to make HR people's lives easier so they can make your lives easier. Focusing on positive things helps with that. [bold added]It was not through her Inc column that I learned of the rebrand: The new blog masthead hit me with Improve Your HR as soon as I stopped by. I was glad to see Evil HR Lady in the byline, as I imagine her other fans are, too. Humor and even, today, negativity have their place for getting attention, but the best commentary goes on the offensive by helping overcome problems. Lucas has been doing this for some time in my view, but I am glad to see someone else I respect stepping back for a moment and calling in this way for more constructive discourse in general. -- CAVLink to Original

The title is not a sentence and it is not a proposition. It is just a long noun phrase (a conjunction). It is grammatically meaningless to add a question mark to the end of a noun phrase, or any other part of language that is not a proposition. There are infinitely many propositions that could be constructed around the noun “Neurophilosophy”, it is impossible to guess what proposition you have in mind. Simply adding a question mark to a sentence does not create a meaningful question, the sentence has to clearly state what information is sought. Also bear in mind basic grammatical rules of English, that you do not say “The dog chased the cat?”, you say “Did the dog chase the cat?”. I’m aware that people talk that way, I’m solidly disapproving of such ways of obscuring language and communicative intent. A proper title for a post briefly states the topic for proposed discussion, it does not state the actual information requested (when the goal is to request information). The body of the original post states precisely what information is sought. A title might reasonably be just a noun phrase, for example “The relationship between neurophilosophy and atheism”, but it still needs supporting propositions, something to indicate why a reasonable person might think that there exists such a relation. The simplest question on this topic that I can imagine would be something like “Is neurophilosophy logically compatible with theism”, however, as the questioner, you have the burden of making a prima facie case in favor of a “yes” or “no” answer, therefore if you hold that the answer is “no”, you should give some reasons for that conclusion (and I would also urge some indication why some people believe the opposite). So what is your question?

Thank you, these books look interesting.

This is where the futility of the urge to embrace a contradiction becomes clearest. De-policing exists because of the growing demand for legally-sanctioned improper use of force and the demand to not use force when proper. A lack of law enforcement encourages chaos, which is the precursor to death (the ultimate goal of evil). When it becomes official policy that police do not even address "little crimes", it is hard to avoid the conclusion that certain rights are unimportant, or don't even exist.

Usually the Van Horn family travels on Labor Day, but this year, we're home helping our kitten adjust to her new home. Perhaps it is because I usually take a break from blogging during such trips that I have managed not to have encountered Frederic Hamber's excellent piece on the holiday. Hamber argues persuasively that it is wrong to emphasize manual labor, and that we should instead celebrate the mental focus and creativity that underlie all production and wealth. I particularly like the below passage:Per blog tradition, her alias shall henceforth be Lucinda. (Image by the author. Copying permitted.)A culture thrives to the extent that it is governed by reason and science, and stagnates to the extent that it is governed by brute force. But the importance of the mind in human progress has been evaded by most of this century's intellectuals. Observe, for example, George Orwell's novel 1984, which depicts a totalitarian state that still, somehow, is a fully advanced technological society. Orwell projects the impossible: technology without the minds to produce it. The best and brightest minds are always the first to either flee a dictatorship in a "brain drain" or to cease their creative efforts. A totalitarian regime can force some men to perform muscular labor; it cannot force a genius to create, nor force a businessman to make rational decisions. A slave owner can force a man to pick peanuts; only under freedom would a George Washington Carver discover ways to increase crop yields. [bold added]The entire piece is similarly inspiring, and I recommend reading it all as a means of making this holiday the celebration that it should be. Happy Labor Day! -- CAVLink to Original

A measure that would partially legalize abortion will be on the ballot in Florida this November, and Trump is learning that it is impossible to pander to everyone:Former President Donald Trump came out on Friday against a ballot measure in his home state of Florida that would expand access to abortion, after spending a day doing damage control on the issue. His announcement came a day after telling NBC News that Florida's six-week ban is "too short" and declining to take a clear stance on a state ballot measure that would expand access to the procedure. [links removed, bold added]This is the usual with Trump. He knows that abortion -- which his Supreme Court appointments have done away with in many states -- is popular with voters, including in Florida. He is also unprincipled and will say whatever he can get away with to get more votes. Unfortunately for him, to get away with something requires that voters aren't paying attention or don't remember anything for very long:Alarmed by what she saw, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the influential anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called Trump on Thursday to ask for clarity on his comments, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation. Trump told her that he didn't state a position on an amendment on his home state's ballot this fall. Dannenfelser told him that "it's imperative that you're clear because there's confusion now that you may be in support of this," the source added. She also told him the amendment is "incongruent" with his opposition to late-term abortion. [links removed, bold added]Ayn Rand once said of her political commentary:When I came here from Soviet Russia, I was interested in politics for only one reason -- to reach the day when I would not have to be interested in politics. I wanted to secure a society in which I would be free to pursue my own concerns and goals...What a rare treasure Ayn Rand was! Like almost everyone else, she wanted to be able to get on with her life, but unlike almost everyone else, she saw the danger that intrusive government poses to being able to do that. So she devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to fighting the cultural trends leading to the bad politics. Unfortunately for the liberty movement, our culture is still not ripe for a return to the pro-freedom politics of early America. Those who want freedom often do so only vaguely, and usually take it for granted. And because so much of politics is wrongly about running other people's affairs, they are rightly disgusted and want no part of it. This leaves it to meddlesome busybodies like the Marjorie Dannenfelsers of the world -- who have no business of their own worth minding and who choose to mind that of others -- to become the influential voices in politics. The situation is hardly unique to the right: There are plenty of "angry liberal" types on the left who are pulling Kamala Harris's strings as well. Americans will have to decide sooner or later how much they like the idea of people like this getting their nasty paws into every aspect of their personal lives. Until more of us start paying attention, holding elected officials accountable for their words and actions, and demanding that they confine their activities to protecting individual rights, it will be only the worst elements in our society who will have the ear of the politicians. -- CAVLink to Original

There is an important distinction between crimes and civil wrongs. A crime is a precisely-defined prohibited act with a particular punishment, which preemptively limits an individual’s actions “against” society. The government, charged with protecting the rights of individuals, promulgates laws saying “If you violate an individual’s rights in manner X, you will receive punishment Y”. This punishment amounts to justice, that a person who behaves like an animal in violating the rights of an individual is treated like an animal, and get locked up or whatever. Intent figures into the determination of whether the accused has committed a crime, and not whether someone’s rights have been violated. Regardless of intent, if you violate a person’s rights, you may be required to compensate that person for the (actual) damage you have done to them. In addition, if you intentionally violate rights in a pre-defined way, you are also subject to punishment. Intent becomes relevant in sorting out the consequences of rights violation, by limiting punishments to chosen acts. The underlying principle is that a person should only be punished for their evil choices. The concept of physical force remains useful because it is a characteristic of (properly-defined) crimes. It’s not that every act of physical force (including speaking) is thereby a crime, rather, every crime is the choice to use physical force in order to violate an individual’s rights. Minimal technical force is frequent in human interactions when it does not violate rights (interfere with a person’s existence), and does even constitute a compensable civil wrong – no damage arises if you speak. Sometimes, more-substantial force is applied unintentionally resulting in damage, for which the actor should compensate the harmed person. When such force is applied intentionally, for the purpose of violating rights, then we have a crime deserving punishment. The discussion may spin out of control when we factor in police use of force. The primary prohibition is against the initiation of force, but we need to also consider retaliatory, defensive and administrative force. Retaliatory force is exclusively the purview of government, it is judicial punishments (let’s leave out nation-on-nation retaliation for aggression). Any person may rightfully use force to defend their lives, and this requires no special permission (but it is subject to judicial review to determine that the force is truly defensive and not, e.g. retaliatory). I also added in a category of administrative force, which is the force used by police when they arrest a person suspected of a crime. This is not the same as retaliatory force (police cannot directly administer retaliatory force, they do so only under the direction of the courts), it is not defensive (the immediacy of stopping the criminal act of force has passed). It is force required to adjudicate the question of whether the suspect has committed a crime, and covers searches and seizures – it requires a certain elevated level of proof that there has been a rights violation. This is where I would place court orders to enforce a judgment, where for instance, a person’s property is seized to satisfy a court judgment that the defendant must compensate the plaintiff.

You claimed that the French were raping and were "taking whatever they wanted, by force", now you seem to admit that there still were contracts, royalties and fees ! You still did NOT answer my question: On what basis do you believe that the contracts with the French Orano SA were concluded while “being raped by their French colonial overlords who were taking whatever they wanted, by force”, while contracting with the Russians will be, on the contrary, purely „for mutual profit” ? In particular: have you established that the Orano contract fees are unfair, that is grossly below the ones paid elsewhere for similar contracts? Please answer this first. Afterwards we will talk about But be prepared to justify every word in it - what exactly were the French (Orano SA) asked to, in what form, what did or didn't they do etc. Also about the "invited Russian military". So: please first answer my question "On what basis..." and then study the facts for justifying the rest. You don't seem to be familiar with the facts of the matter, only with the "anti-imperialist" slogans/catchphrases.

On what basis do you believe that the Niger state budget will profit more from the contract with the Russian Rosatom than from the current one with the French Orano SA ? (Of course, Orano pays to the state of Niger royalties, taxes, and other fees associated with the extraction of natural resources.)

Correct, contracting for mutual profit. And that is what Niger is now doing with Russian companies. No more being raped by their French colonial overlords who were taking whatever they wanted, by force.

So then this ideological accusation of “resource rape” is nothing more than standard socialist whining about companies making a profit. The only thing special about African countries – and not unique to them – is the idea that the wealth of a nation belong to “the people”, to be administered for the greatest common good by the benevolent government. Which leads to such obscenities as the idea that “our jobs” are being exported to nations that do not have the obscene pro-labor anti-capital laws that you find in the US and Europe.

I don’t agree, because you haven’t argued for your claim. It’s not obviously wrong, nor is it obviously right, so I reject the claim pending necessary support – therefore I disagree. [Fill in the argument as necessary]. I would agree that the refusal to comply with the court order is a wrongful act, I reject the position that such refusal retroactively changes the nature of the initial act, especially when this conclusion is derived automatically from the fact that the final court has rendered a particular judgment, and does not consider the court’s rationale for rendering that judgment. As we know from the substantial number of cases where SCOTUS has overruled itself, the notion of a “final” ruling itself has a dubious pedigree. The concept of “initiation of force” requires a firm objective definition and should not be operationally defines as “an event where an accused is found by a court to be at fault”. The act of a court ruling that a person is liable for an act does not convert that initial act into “initiation of force”, nor does refusal / failure to comply with a court-ordered remedy convert an accident into initiation of force. I do understand the interest in converting all instances of legal enforcement into responses to “initiation of force”. In my opinion, the correct path of reasoning centers around the concept of “right”. If a person interferes (in a suitably-defined manner) in another’s right to his life, then in justice it is proper that he be required to compensate the other. In some situations, the interference is sufficiently evil and knowable in advance that we properly classify the act as initiation of force, analyzing the act as a crime deserving of punishment and not merely compensation. I recognize the desire to simplify the concept of “right” to “non-initiation of force”, but attempts to reduce all rights-violations to “initiation of force” renders the notion of initiation of force incomprehensible. Instead, we have rights, which can be infringed by evil means (therefore punished) or by innocent means (therefore compensated). Compensation for infringement of rights remains enforceable by the court, since the duty of the courts is to protect rights, not just punish for initiation of force.

Don't forget Brazil, South Africa, Syria and most recently, Niger. The latter is tired of being resource raped by France, especially of uranium. With Russian help they have kicked out the French and the Germans and are tightening security relations with Russia. This is happening all across Africa.

@happiness If you want to catch and grip the attention of people whose pain is as yours, I think you need to go into a lot of detail in sharing what you have to endure. Presented in a personal, sensitive self-awareness way. Then they will recognize that you are kin in a certain special suffering and situation. Explain in detail what is regenerative medicine and why you think it superior to more usual therapies on offer. Testify as to what benefits you have received from regenerative medicine. Use a headline not referring to your journey (even though your story is told within the discourse); let the headline be about people experiencing what sort of pain and situation you have. I hope you can get free of this pain, happiness. My younger sister ended her life (.45 to the heart I gather) at age 66. Apparently over becoming trapped in obesity and chronic pain for which she could find no help. Happiness is serious business.

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. Did you know that heavily-laden rafts travel down rivers faster than light ones? The reason might surprise you. 2. I keep a "computing hell" log in case I ever have to use Windows on a regular basis, and might have already reaped the reward of not having my laptop effectively bricked by a bad update. (A developer discusses what went wrong here.) On a more positive note, I like a lot of these usability-enhancing registry tweaks for Windows 11 I ran into this morning. 3. Most of us enjoy the dream of mankind colonizing other planets, but almost as many would dismiss the idea of colonizing Mercury out of hand. While I am not on board with his rationale for doing so, I think Jim Shifflett makes an intriguing case for the first planet being most feasible with current technology:The first thought about Mercury is that it would have very high temperatures and no water, because the equatorial surface temperature ranges between -183oC and 427oC as the planet rotates. But an analysis of temperature vs. latitude and depth shows that the temperature is nearly constant at room temperature (22+/-1oC) in underground rings circling the planet's poles, and deeper than .7 meter below the surface. Similar results are found using numerical techniques in an Icarus paper, Vol. 141, 179-193 (1999). [links omitted]And with the heat problem out of the way, Shifflett also argues that there are sufficient water deposits nearby to enable self-sustaining underground colonies. Bonus Time: We get our first family cat this weekend! Thanks to the men responsible for every kid in this generation named Aaron being called A-A-Ron, Mrs. Van Horn has had to shoot down naming him Jamar. (See cat around the two minute mark.) 4. During the covid pandemic, the commentary I found the most useful on the subject, apart from that of Amesh Adalja, was that of Derek Lowe, whose normal focus is drug discovery, but who writes entertaining material about many other related matters. I rather enjoyed his post to the effect that he was backing down from writing so much about covid. Aside from being eager for his writing on other subjects, I enjoyed his thoughts on the anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy nuts who made such pests of themselves:So I think that the hypothesis advanced in the paper has not panned out. Most medical hypotheses don't, even ones that are backed up by far more reasoning and far more data than this one. It's not a crazy paper, but it's not irrefutable either, not by a long shot. Over the last 30 years, I have learned that even my best ideas get brushed aside by real-world data, and I don't take it personally. But this argument will not be persuasive to someone who is worried about the idea of getting a coronavirus vaccination in general. They either will not accept this response, or will wave it aside and move on to the next objection: "Well, what about this? Can we be sure that this other thing won't happen?" It never stops. [bold added]Lowe is himself fond of saying you can't use reason to argue someone out of a position that they did not arrive at by reason. And I am fond of saying sometimes it helps just knowing that one isn't alone in one's annoyance with irrationality. -- CAVLink to Original

A quick search about French colonization of Vietnam has the French using the same humanitarian reasoning in that they needed to protect the population of 350k Catholics their missionaries had cultivated. https://oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/87941/student-old/?task=1

This morning, I ran into a couple of letters to advice columnists that addressed similar issues. In each case, a spouse was walking all over the personal space of another. The first I ran into concerned a main breadwinner sometimes working from home, and randomly bombing parts of his stay-at-home wife's routine. Miss Manners's reply to that one was basically for the wife to make her needs known. Fair enough, and adequate from an etiquette perspective, although I expect that the writer would want further advice on how to do that, as well as how to negotiate such boundaries. Going further along those lines was a recent Carolyn Hax letter. This one concerned a husband coming home and ruining his wife's alone time by interrupting a show she likes to watch then with unwanted commentary. This wife has a traditional job, and because their home is small, that night is her alone time. Hax's advice is good, and accounts for different levels of severity of the problem, and she sometimes adds intelligent comments from her readers. They're adorable, but keeping them from killing themselves for eight hours straight can be hard on you. (Image by Mike Cox, via Unsplash, license.)One of these was something that could help a lot, assuming the offending partner had at some point shared enough of the responsibility for caring for a baby or toddler, as the below should make clear:Here’s what we learned from having little kids: It’s the hope for relief that breaks you. Being on for eight hours without help is hard, but expecting help and having it not show up is torture.It wasn't exactly PTSD, but that brought back memories from the time my wife was in residency and I had to take the kids -- a baby and a toddler at the time -- all ... day ... long for about half of each week. We used sitters and part-time daycare: It was hard whenever those fell through unexpectedly. Too many people forget to take care of themselves, or forget that their loved ones need to do the same. It's important whether or not young ones are involved, but it's much easier to see with that kind of experience. -- CAVLink to Original

I my opinion 'mainstreaming' of the disabled in public school settings was born more from budgetary concerns than any kind of pedagogic or empathetic concerns from administrators. In the case with my daughter we had to confront the disticts' 'placement' plans on numerous occasions, even among situations in 'special rooms'. In a few instances her 'peers' weren't handicapped enough as it were. Some of the children were ambulatory and prone to aggression and my daughter was incapable of escape or defense if she became a target, coupled with the budgetary concerns not allowing for a one on one caregiver situation , her personal safety was to be left to chance or luck, a placement the district was more than happy to make had we not intervened. The major fault lies in the structure of public education and mandatory attendance laws.

First, I don’t think you’ve paraphrased Al-Kufr Bit-Tāghūt correctly, which is “Disbelief in Idolatry”, which includes “rebellion” as well as disbelief in earthly tyrants. However, it is clear that they believe that judgment and legislation belong to Allah alone, so yes only Allah may write the law, and there is strong parallelism between that and Christian beliefs in God-given laws and rights. You also find sectarian squabbles in Islam that are like the sectarian squabbles of Christianity (Western v. Orthodox; Roman vs. Protestant; innumerable sub-splits within the Protestant strain). Sub-sect hatred in Islam is much stronger that what we observe in Christianity, though not unlike European religious persecution of the 15th-17th centuries. I do not believe that there is a significantly different theory of rights in fundamental Islam vs. Christianity. Despite right-wing claims to the contrary, you don’t have the rights that we understand to be “individual rights” because of God, that is a later human-created add-on. Such augmentations also exist in Islam, but they are not part of Islamic tradition, that are post hoc attempts to harmonize this medieval religion with modern knowledge. It is a general rule that world leaders accommodate all sorts of evil dictators thus subverting the concept of “rights”. It is as though Putin has a right to be a dictator, likewise Lukashenko, Xi Jinping, Afwerki, Ortega, Kim Jong-un and zillions of Islamic potentates. Most of the world is run by a dictator. Clearly, rights-respecting government is a minority view of how to run a nation. In that unfree majority, there is a divide between kleptocratic dictatorship, (personal) power-lust dictatorship, and ideological dictatorship (mainly the Islamic dictatorships, since communism is now a dead ideology). However, let us note that hard communist dictatorships are a thing of the past, but soft socialist dictatorships are a thing of the present and future. I consider ideological dictatorships to be the most dangerous, because you can kill a dictator relatively easily, compared to killing an idea which is very hard to eradicate. So the correct question to be asking is, at what point should the US government (President) refuse to deal with a more-dictatorial world leader. I propose that refusing to deal with Germany’s Olaf Scholz because he does not adhere to the Objectivist view of proper government would simply be wrong-headed. You don’t refuse to buy groceries from a Catholic merchant because that would sanction irrational beliefs, you just bite your tongue and maybe find a nice libertarian atheist vendor, if you can.

It was not a debate about Rand. It was a debate against Biddle. Alex did not claim to understand Rand. He was asking what Biddle believed, proposing him questions and allowing him to make himself more clear. He asked good questions. Biddle certainly claimed to understand Rand, but failed to justify his own thinking. He wasn't able to answer the questions. His answers flailed, and when he diverged from Rand, he did even worse.

What makes it objective is the thorough consideration of all aspects of U.S. foreign policy and all possible explanations offered to get an integrated theory. The U.S. is an empire because it has the attributes of an empire and acts like an empire. I'll quote the portion that impressed me with it's succinctness: Traditional Explanations The Logic of US Foreign Policy by Sylvan and Majeski offers a consistent explanation for American interventions of the past several decades. In contrast, the usual explanations – by proponents as well as opponents of these wars – are mostly pretexts, rationalizations or at best partial aspects, as the following overview shows. Defending democracy and human rights: This traditional justification is not very convincing, since democratic governments have been overthrown (A, M, N), autocrats have been supported (E and I), human rights and international law have been violated or violations tolerated by the US. Combating terrorism: Paramilitary groups – including Islamist organizations – have been used for decades by the US to eliminate opposing regimes (N and R). Specific threats or aggressions against the US: In retrospect, most of these claims turned out to be incorrect or made-up (#13; e.g. Tonkin, incubator babies and WMD claims). Raw materials (especially oil and gas): Even enemy states generally want to sell their raw materials to the West, but are prevented from doing so by means of sanctions or war. This is because from an imperial point of view, their independence and influence is seen as a threat. Was the Iraq war about oil? Hardly. Already prior to 2003, Iraq had supplied its oil mainly to the West; the Iraqi oil sector was not privatized after the war, and production licences were also issued to corporations in France, Russia and China (which opposed the war). Was the Syrian war about natural gas pipelines? No (see here and here). The plans for regime change and war against geopolitically independent Syria had existed for decades and were to be implemented during the so-called “Arab Spring”. (See also a comment by the Syrian president). Was the Afghanistan war about a natural gas pipeline? No. The Taliban were and are interested in the TAPI pipeline, but didn’t accept US political and military demands. Was the Libya war about oil reserves? No. Libya was already one of Europe’s most important suppliers of oil under Gaddafi, and security of supply has declined significantly since the war. Libya, however, pursued an independent and comprehensive Africa policy – financed by its oil wealth – which collided with the plans of the US and France. Was the Iranian regime change in 1953 about the nationalization of oil? No. The US tried to mediate in the British-Iranian oil dispute and urged the British to compromise. Only when Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh cooperated with the Communist Tudeh Party and opened the country to the Soviet Union did the CIA intervene. Iranian oil, however, remained nationalized even after the coup. What was the 2019 Venezuela coup attempt about? See Venezuela: It’s Not About Oil. Could renewable energies solve the raw materials problem? Hardly, because renewable energies, storage technologies and high-tech electronics require rare-earth metals, 97% of which are currently produced by China, and conflict minerals such as coltan from the Congo. The “Petro-Dollar”: The petro-dollar thesis was developed in the course of the Iraq war. However, the significance of the US dollar does not derive from oil, but from US economic power. While many states naturally prefer the stable dollar for their raw material exports, enemy states often have to switch to other currencies in order to circumvent sanctions (L, e.g. Iran). Capitalism: In 1917 Lenin described “imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism,” since capitalist states would have to conquer markets for their overproduction. However, even enemy states want to trade with the West, but are prevented from doing so by sanctions or war. Moreover, pre-capitalist states like Rome and Spain and even anti-capitalist states like the Soviet Union had already waged imperial wars. National debt: The national debt is also no reason for US wars, as the US is creating its own money by using the Fed. Moreover, wars themselves contribute immensely to national expenses. Arms industry: In 1961 US President Eisenhower warned of the increasing influence of the “military-industrial complex”. The latter is certainly one of the main profiteers of wars, but this applies as well to countries such as Russia, China, Sweden and Switzerland. Moreover, US wars are not arbitrary, but follow a certain logic; after all, even the Roman Empire did not conduct its wars merely to produce as many weapons as possible. The “Israel Lobby”: This aspect was emphasized in the book of the same name by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer. The Israeli government and pro-Israeli organizations such as AIPAC lobbied for the 2003 Iraq War and a war against Iran. As a hegemonic power, however, the US must intervene from East Asia to Central Africa and South America, and even the wars in the Middle East follow a superordinate logic. (More: The “Israel Lobby”: Facts and Myths) Neoconservatives: Another hypothesis proposes that US wars are driven by the so-called neo­con­ser­vatives. This idea is disconfirmed, for instance, by the numerous wars initiated or continued by the liberal Clinton and Obama administrations (Yugoslavia, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, etc.) »We’ve got about five or ten years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.« Pentagon policy chief Paul Wolfowitz to General Wesley Clark in 1991 (FORA)

"A “universal” is any property, quality, relation, characteristic, attribute, or combination of these—generally, any “feature of reality”—which may be identically present in diverse contexts. The “problem” of universals is—to put it in any of several ways—whether there are, or can be, strict identities between disparate contexts; whether two objects can literally have common attributes; whether universals (i.e., repeatable predicables, or qualities that can be “predicated” of more than one object) are really and genuinely present in their apparent “instances” or whether the mind merely behaves as though they are." "There are precisely two basic solutions to the genuine problem of universals: realism and nominalism. The former holds that there are some real universals, the latter that there aren’t any. A general theory of universals may hold that some apparent universals exist only in the mind and that others are real in some other sense. But for any given universal, these two alternatives exhaust the possibilities, and an ontology that admits even a single real universal is a version of realism. Though there are subheadings under each type of solution, there is no genuine third alternative unless we are willing to dispense with the Law of the Excluded Middle. And - importantly - both views are irreducibly ontological. There is simply no way to reduce the problem of universals to a pure matter of epistemology; that is why it has traditionally been regarded as a problem of metaphysics in the first place" - Scott Ryan

My daughter uses a wheelchair and her speech development is delayed because of a neurological defect that prevents some signals from passing accurately from the brain stem to her muscles. At school, she is in a regular classroom for the non-basic, or subject-based curriculum such as history, science, music, art and field trips. She goes to a special education classroom for core cirriculum, specifically reading and math (though she also does math in the regular classroom because she is at her grade level). Her reading development was also delayed because speech delays (including those that are solely of a physical rather than cognitive nature) delay language development, where that's not the case with numbers or other subjects. She has no problem interacting with other children and has only one friend who is disabled - another girl who uses a wheelchair. She plays tag and tether ball with the other kids, and thanks to her iBot she can be in an upright balance mode for either and she can even do relays and sports during PE. Her speech can be hard to understand, but my daughter knows it's incumbent upon her to slow down and be more understandable. And the kids tend to be patient enough to listen. What the other kids see is someone who is learning to enjoy life in spite of physical disabilities with the help of parents who obtain her innovations that extend her reach into places that, for instance, regular wheelchairs can't. She's so independent that she only needs help if something falls on the floor beyond where she could reach down or to use the lift that helps her use the bathroom. With regard to the kids with mental disabilities, yeah, even my daughter has problems with them when they act outside the mainstream (like the weird boy who always talks about guns but doesn't know what one is or how they work, and yet knows about shooting and pointing). Those kids spend most or even all of their day in the special ed class where they can get individual instruction. I've learned that the key with getting kids to understand disabilities is just to tell them the truth and confront it head on. What I see the problem is the altruistic notion of washing over the fact that these kids are different. Everyone is different. And I remind people there's nothing wrong with that, if nothing else because I sure as hell would rather be me than them. But that's hard to grasp in a collectivist or altruistic leaning society. When I tell kids the truth about my daughter's disability or even what's wrong with the kids who are retarded, autistic or have Down syndrome, and why they are that way, then it all makes sense and they are OK with it. Maybe that's why truth can set one free. But schools are good at lying to kids and that's the problem.