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My great-grandfather volunteered to be cannon fodder for the human mass that drowned Berlin in blood (both its own and Berlins'). Another volunteered to liberate the fine peoples of Finland all the way back in '39. Back in those days, in that place, you were given the freedom to volunteer where you were told, or suffer the consequences. This was the situation in Denamjuk's homeland. A homeland under a dictatorship so horrible that people had actually welcomed the Nazis as liberators at first, and it took a lot of effort on the Nazis' behalf for that perception to change. That homeland had declared him and all those like him to be traitors for not dying, and for that had condemned him and his relatives to death and enslavement. Actual experience may vary. Maybe he deserted his ranks and ran towards the German lines with a white flag screaming on how killing and torturing people has been his lifelong dream? Maybe he was nailing babies to poles, opening the gas valves in the showers and making a jewskin rug in his spare time? Maybe he is, in fact, Ivan the Terrible and the American, Israeli, German, and Ukrainian authorities had simply missed it somehow? Maybe. And the day that is proven, he is to be hung whether 91, 120 or on his deathbed, because some people should not be allowed to die on their own terms. But until that day, condemning him is nothing more than a ritual sacrifice which, while fitting contextually, is not how we do things anymore.

I think you should be more logical here. Clearly there is no relation between being rational or irrational and dying. The common element is the acting. By the Methods of Difference and Agreement, the acting causes the dying. I am being extremely literal here, no humor or mockery or sarcasm is intended or implied. As not-acting is equivalent to not-living, I don't see much value in performing the experiment to verify that not-acting leads to not-dying. Ayn Rand makes the case that acting is the essence of living. The root cause of dying then is living. She went on to make the further point that avoiding death is not the same as living life. There are three objections to making immortality an explicit goal. First, the purpose behind being rational is to have a strong, flourishing life, to the extent possible and within one's control. Maintaining one's health and even being willing to replace failing body parts is consistent with that. Striving for immortality is fully equating one's life with one's body, and actually creates a mind-body conflict by subordinating mind to body. Mind and body are of co-equal importance. Second, immortality is a species of the infinite and so is literally unachievable. Lastly, the costs of extreme longevity might be incompatible with flourishing. Costs may refer to bad implementations of replacement bodies and body parts. Costs may also refer to the limits of your consciousness to remember your own identity. Immortality of the body is not necessarily the same as the constancy of your mind. What is point of striving today if tomorrow you cannot remember what you did or why? Infinite memory is no more possible than any other kind of infinity.

I agree with the main point of the post, though I disagree with aspects of the proposed alternative approach (or maybe it's just the specific application?). While I agree that people don't ask enough questions, the alternative of asking too many can be just as bad. In other words, asking question after question of a person won't necessarily lead them in any kind of meaningful direction. Questions are a tool, like any other pedagogical instrument in your tool box. They don't necessarily fit every situation, just as one can't use a hammer on just any old task. Often, as I think is demonstrated in that post, a student* gets into the habit of just thinking of ways to shoot down the question without really thinking about it. Of course some judgment is necessary to know what questions to ask, but often there are premises that need to be nipped in the bud or exposed. For example, at one point in that post you asked T-1000 if deceiving someone makes it impossible for them to act in their self-interest. He replied that "It makes it more difficult for him to act in his self interest but does not make it metaphysically impossible." The proper response here could be in the form of a question, but it shouldn't be one that keeps things on this highly abstract level (because of course he can just reply with an equally abstract response that shoots it right down, viz. one about Kant's categorical imperative). The problem is, who knows what anyone is talking about there? There needs to be some kind of examination of the concepts used, and concretes that the concepts are scoping in on. What is 'self-interest'? Why should one care about the interests of others? These questions require a lot of thought in order to properly answer, and it's likely one can get stuck on them for quite a while. That's not a problem though; that's where things should be, especially if someone is new to these kinds of topics. But further, if the discussion seems like it's veering off into uncharted territories or if the answers to the questions appear to be too vague or unnecessarily polemical, then the blueprints need to be brought out to guide the discussion better. Sometimes questions won't work, and the person generally in the 'question-asking' role will have to state why they think a different direction should be taken, then ask if that makes sense to the person. Just to tie things back together, the Socratic method is situationally useful. It can be used to make discussions more concrete, but like any other tool, it can be used in such a way as to cause further unclarity. *Though the relationship doesn't necessarily have to be the student-teacher kind. It's a matter of communicating well in general.

You want Brook to go on the Russian Al Jazeera? Why?

Thank you, Jaskn. The only problem I see has to do with a potential misintrepatation with Ayn Rand's statements about the falsehood and evil of mind-body dichotomy. Let's review this text from "The New Intellectual" " They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave. They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable." It is not in my agenda to loss my memory, to get my bones broken out of osteoporosis, to die because of a ruptured appendix or an auto-immune attack against my own cells. Yet all those things happen. We get sick. We die. These are things that happen because of the nature of things: for my cells being what they are; for viruses being what they are and acting according to their nature. However, once we understand ("obey") nature, then we seek to command it. We design medicines and treatments and enhancements. The only way I do not see a contradiction here is to consider that the real agenda of the integrated self is to survive qua man as long as a life qua man is possible. I mean, to consider my cells as a system working with the shared goal of sustaining a particular kind of brain which underpins a particular kind of mind which seeks its own survival. The real and only agenda of the integrated man is to seek immortality qua man. Medicine and related sciences are, therefore, an essential activity of an Objectivist Society, as much as philosophy, for the simple reason that thinking cannot occur out of a body that underpins that thinking.

Are you saying that you've interviewed "most people" on the subject of what they think of images of people with their flesh pressed against glass? If so, that must have taken years of your time! Which humans' preferences? Those who agree with your subjective judgments of beauty? "Harmonious" and "distorted" are not opposites, and I think that "most people" would recognize that. Do you seriously believe that you've never seen any images of distorted human forms which you thought were beautiful? Wow. I'm now wondering if you're even aware of how much imagery in the world is distorted, or if you have the visual capacity to recognize most deviations from how things look in reality. All of that is subjective and/or collectivistic. People's ideas of what is beautiful or ugly evolve over time, just like fashion. Skin which appears to be "not healthy" to you would have been seen as the ultimate in beauty at different times in different cultures. Having a bluish pale tone, for example, can be seen as aristocratic (lack of exposure to the sun and lack of physical stamina can suggest that one has been so successful that one need not labor for a living). People can be trained, in effect, by the subjective views of others, especially when the others are the majority. Those who aren't in the arts professions don't spend much time analyzing what they think is beautiful or why. They generally follow what is popular. They let society define what is beautiful, and then they claim that the collective opinion of "most people" that they're following is "objective." And in other cultures and in other times, other people have seen large noses as beautiful. Saville's point seems to be that women are covering themselves in makeup because they have been convinced by the pressure of the collective, subjective opinions of the masses that humans are naturally ugly. I think she has a good point. I think that anyone who views women as being so horribly ugly that they need to paint and disguise themselves is coming from a mindset of weakness and self-denial. It's an act of caving in to others' subjective tastes. And I think it's a sign of even greater weakness to argue that one's hopping on the bandwagon of common subjective opinion is "objective." You might as well argue that it is "objective" for women to "take advantage" of wearing burqas as a "corrective measure." J