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As America prepares to certify our next President, a large band of hooligans have taken upon themselves to storm the Capitol. This in the name of Freedom? Are these hooligans striving to look for their Fuhrer? As a footnote, something like this happened in fiction- in Atlas Shrugged.

"DERIVING AN ETHIC OF EGOISM FROM THE FACTS OF EXISTENCE: THE PARALLEL PHILOSOPHIES OF SPINOZA AND AYN RAND" by Dagney Palmer. https://www.academia.edu/19599757/DERIVING_AN_ETHIC_OF_EGOISM_FROM_THE_FACTS_OF_EXISTENCE_THE_PARALLEL_PHILOSOPHIES_OF_SPINOZA_AND_AYN_RAND?email_work_card=title I haven't read it yet. It is only 5 pages when shrunk and white space galore removed.

Yes, sounds sensible, James. I would like to add one point about sexual orientations. When it comes to sexual orientation in the context of romantic love, and all the more in long-term romantic relationships, it is the whole person of the other, not only their sexual allures, that is paramount; and the relationship is above all a relationship of persons. Embodied, sexual, to be sure. But persons. That is shown in relationships, whatever the sexual orientation abiding in them, in the way couples continue to be in love and take care of each other years and decades after the sexual aspect has gone away due to sexual declines in the body. The persons continue in their special, towering love. In the early ’90’s Allan Gotthelf wrote to me concerning my new philosophy journal Objectivity, and he inquired whether he perhaps knew me. I wrote to him and recounted what had transpired between us in ’78 and how things had gone on to Jerry’s death. I mentioned to him that in Jerry’s hospital room in the last hours and through his last heartbeat, I was alone with Jerry. And I wrote to Allan, “that is the way it was and that is how it ought to have been.” To have loved and been loved in that total way is a terribly fortunate thing, and it is a universe in which there is only you two persons.

This time we weigh in with regard to the Snowden question. Should he be pardoned? We think so. His crime was a benefit to Americans rather than a detriment, and the traditional whistleblower route was not a viable option.

Your response is interesting, to say the least. But I do not agree that joining the military is, in itself, highly immoral. What would be immoral, if not illicit, is a country's use of the military to initiate force and violence against another country. Our military is supposed to be prepared to defend our nation against the initiation of force and violence against us. In that regard, just joining the military is, in fact an honorable move in that the military person then trains to defend against enemies. Also, the personnel in our armed forces are not "volunteers" in the sense that they are paid, given essentials (food, clothing, shelter, etc.), and even "perks" such as the GI bill of rights which helps pay for their higher education. A nation whose basis is the socio-economic system of capitalism requires an armed force to defend its citizens' rights.