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I suggest that moral responsibility for training and education of children lies firstly with the child's parents, although not as part of a package of responsibility attaching merely to having caused the child's existence. That Objectivist position focussing on causal relationship, down from the era of N. Branden in the 1960's, was off the mark. Moral responsibility for training and educating the child lies firstly with the child's parents, I suggest, because of the moral goodness of responsiveness to persons and the potential person they may become, responsiveness to persons as persons. That responsiveness is, I say, the core of moral relations among people (and indeed, differently, relations of a self to itself). That is the preciousness that is the moral in a social setting. This position is a cashing out of the concept of moral justice, treating a thing as the kind of thing it is—that moral virtue. What a thing is includes its internal systems, but as well its distinctive external relations, actual and potential. The relations of responsiveness to persons as persons have a specially intense and distinctive character in the relation between the persons who are parent and child (natural parent most strongly, of course, but strong with adoptive parents as well). Additionally, there is a moral goodness in the benevolent protectiveness—that responsiveness—between any adult and any child. That such responsiveness fosters continuance of the species human as human may well be the underlying biological reason for this responsiveness. But that is not the reason the responsiveness of parent or other adult to the child and responsiveness of the child to them as persons is moral. Rather, the nature of value in the life of individual humans together, which is their best situation in the world, is the source of the moral goodness of such responsiveness to persons as persons.

Arguendo "wanting" to have or keep raising children MEANS being prepared for, and earnestly and genuinely loving and caring for another person who starts out deeply dependent. Whether it fits any philosophical standard, humans DO literally need love to grow into a sane and moral adult.. it is not a psychological luxury, it is a deep human necessity. Perhaps it is only moral to "have" and/or be the guardian of anyone, if and only if you actually WANT to be one, with everything that entails, and ALL that it means. Summary: Have a kid you don't want and/or cannot care for? Just f#@&ing give it up for adoption as soon/early as you know, so someone else can do so. Our world would be a MUCH better place, and so many people SO much better off, if everyone followed this.

By “obligation”, I presume you are referring to a moral obligation, one that rationally follows from your choice to create a human being. Some people end up creating a child by accident, or are tricked into it, and I’m not talking about those cases – I mean a conscious deliberate choice. Just to be explicit, I also assume when you say “our” children, I assume you mean your own children, not “society’s children”. What do I owe my child, what do you owe your child, what does he owe his child. Creating a person should not be done on a whim, one should have a clear understanding of why you are doing so, and not just buying a puppy. A puppy will never become a rational being, a child might. An infant will not actually develop into a rational being without some kind of guidance. It’s irrational to think that children are born with Galt’s Speech planted in their brains whereby they can magically discover how to become fully rational. This is what a parent has an obligation to do: to provide such guidance. It is probably a joint effort between the parents and the parent’s agents, so that mom and dad don’t have to actually devise lessons in reading and writing. Your question seems to be focused on specific technical content. The list of specific technical things that a child should learn is huge: reading, writing, rhetoric, literature, history, philosophy, physics, biology, economics, fishing, hunting, home economics (i.e. “how to wash your clothes; how to cook a meal”). Personally, I think one should try to explain the basic logic of numeric exponentiation, if you can. You don’t teach long lists of facts, you teach very small sets of facts in the course of teaching methods of reasoning. In other words, all you have to teach is the tools of reason, but you do have to go beyond just saying “A is A”.

I believe the people I mentioned are reputable for the usual reasons – and AlexL knows full well what those reasons are: Their credentials, their past, their manner, their logical presentation, is what they say consistent with itself, is what they say consistent with what I know, etc. All this is obvious. AlexL is engaging in “How do you know that you know?” ==> “You can’t know anything.” ==> “You are wrong.” baloney. He writes: “PS: some illustrious names are missing, like William Scott Ritter, John Mark Dougan and other darlings of the Russia’s governmental media...” – what a nasty piece of work is this AlexL.

The problem is that it is not just a legal entity. Rather, it is a government entity, empowered with government functions and powers, and controlled by a single corporation. That corporation obtained that special privilege in the '60s by corrupting the Florida legislature. Let's be clear—Disney is not some free market hero who fought government and improved property rights for all. Rather, they bribed and corrupted a state legislature to gain exemptions from law, special privileges and their own local government, for themselves. That is not capitalism, it is crony-statism.

Only indirectly, as a reaction to the horrors of AI “reasoning”. Of course I am using “can” in the standard Objectivist way, as “possible, based on evidence”, not “imaginable, where anything is possible” and one can “imagine” A and Not A being simultaneously true. I have wasted some time trying to understand the “epistemology” of ChatGPT, and conclude that its greatest weakness is that there is little if anything that passes for a relationship between evidence, and evaluation of evidence. I was puzzled about how something so fundamental could be missed, but then I realized that this is because the system doesn’t have anything like a conceptual system that constitutes its knowledge of the universe, it has a vast repository of sensory impressions – a gruel of “information”. But furthermore: it cannot actually observe the universe, it can only store raw experiences that a volitional consciousness of the genus homo hands it. If you ask about the basis for one of its statements (ordinary statements of observable fact, not high-level abstractions), it just gives templatic answers about “a wide variety of sources and experts”. It does react to a user rejecting one of its statements, apologizing for any confusion, embracing the contradiction, then saying that usually A and Not A are not both true. It is perfectly happy to just make up facts. Sometimes it says that there are many possible answers, it depends on context, then if you give it some context it will make up an answer. Human reasoning is centered around conceptual and propositional abstractions that subsume observations, where the notion of “prediction” is central to evaluation of knowledge. Competing theories are central to human knowledge, so when we encounter a fact that can be handled by one theory but not another, we have gained knowledge that affects our evaluation of the competing systems. These AIs do not seem to evaluate knowledge, or even data. Instead, they filter responses based on something – it seems to be centered around "the current conversation".

Life in Russia: 1.5 Years Later, by Setarko, Russia, 27 May 2023 "it's been almost 1.5 years since life in Russia changed dramatically. But today I would like to talk not about the life and prosperity (or decline) of the country, but about the lives of ordinary people in it. There are two points of view. According to the first, people in Russia have lost access to hundreds of services and services, people are leaving the country by the millions, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to survive. According to the other, the country has only benefited from the special military operation that was launched, the people have rallied, import substitution is in full swing, and the next few years will be OUR years. Well, let me, as a really average resident of Russia, try to describe what has really changed in our lives during this time."

At the level of college education, your moral responsibilities have very little to do with children. There is nothing resembling a principle “you should pay for your child’s college education”. Perhaps the child needs a life lesson in finding their own means of survival; perhaps a college education would not be beneficial to the particular child; perhaps shouldering the cost would be self-sacrificial; perhaps the child will foreseeably become the next John Galt or Hank Reardon given an advanced education. Parents have to engage in a long-term cost-benefit analysis to determine what role they should play in their child’s higher education. As for the dangers of woke Marxist propaganda, it is short-sighted to declare that you will never send a child of yours to such an institution. The alternative of sending them to Bible school is even worse, and there are slim pickin’s when it comes to Objectivist universities. If you feel that you have done a bad job of teaching your child to disregard irrational propaganda, that makes your balancing analysis harder. The analysis can be made easier if the child is dead set on a degree in social justice and community activism, and a career in destroying civilization.

"If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty." Ayn Rand I suggest we read between the lines and remember what kinds of values Ms. Rand deemed to be valid, and just how human Ms. Rand actually was.

It depends on what colleges are available, how much real knowledge they teach, how much Marxist indoctrination they push etc. It may be worth the money to self learn, hire persons with knowledge, private tutors, mentors etc. Good parents do everything in their power to launch their children as high and as far as they wish to go, sometimes that is something more spiritual than economic, like a small business, or career in art... it depends greatly on the context of the child's wants and needs and realistic dreams, and the means of the parents, good people work this out and do their best. Rationalizing falling short of this is usually confined to people who really would rather have the "hat" than feed the child...[paraphrasing] but really that was one of THE wisest things Rand ever said in her writings.

If the very nature of your method causes errors, then yes, you lose the ability to attain any kind of certainty. But Objectivism doesn't portray rationality as a matter of finding an absolute truth and anything short of that is an error. Certainty is instead about knowing you use a method that brings you closer to hitting the mark every time. Using an objective methodology doesn't cause errors, or at least, it's a method that doesn't take you further away from the truth or what is the case. If objectivity by nature caused errors, there would have to be something pervasive about human reasoning that completely prevents you from even getting closer to the truth. Say you wanted to make a cheese omelette. There is a basic method to it, with variations in technique and skill that lead to different qualities of omelettes, but there is nothing about the basic omelette making technique that by its very nature prevents you from making a successful omelette. You could apply the methods incorrectly, but that's not because the methods necessarily cause you to do it wrong. There are different wrong ways to do it though, that by nature will always make a failed omelette. You can't crack the eggs into boiling water to make an omelette, you're always going to end up with poached eggs. No matter how much you try, if you cook eggs that way, you will never make an omelette. You might make something that resembles one, but it will always be an "erroneous" omelette.

Over the past decade or so it has become much more acceptable to "punish" people because of their opinions -- because they expressed them, or just because they have them. It has been pointed out that there is a big difference between the government carrying out this "punishment," such as by throwing people in prison, and private individuals (or groups) carrying it out, such as by denying service at a bar or a bank. In the latter case, property owners are merely exercising their right to their own property, and their right to choose who they associate with, and if somebody were to force them to serve people they don't want to, even if this force is only forcing them to do what is in their actual best interest anyway, then, as Leonard Peikoff puts it, the act of forcing it on them makes it wrong. However, in some cases the motivation behind using your own personal property to do something, and using the government to do it, can be the same, and in the case of "punishing" opinions, the motivation is wrong in both cases, even though initiating force is the only thing that should properly be illegal. It is proper to address the motivation and expose its incorrectness even if it is not (yet) infringing anyone's rights. By doing so, it may be possible to talk people out of acting on it. One can say that, for example, nihilism ought to be legal if you don't infringe anyone's rights, but one can also say that it is still wrong. My point is: the motivation for punishing people's opinions contradicts the motivation for having free speech, which means, a person can't consistently support both. When you see more and more people "punishing" opinions, and supporting the punishment of opinions, you can know that the days are numbered for free speech, even if the government itself has not yet begun to act against it. The motivation for free speech is confidence in reason (and reality). We can afford to allow people to state falsehoods because we have confidence that reason will expose the falsehoods as such. Free speech also ensures that it's possible for people to speak the truth even when it's controversial, so that the truth can also be exposed. This confidence is what allows a store owner to let people he disagrees with walk into his store and buy stuff. He knows that their opinion, even if wrong, is not a threat to him; he knows that reality and reason will prevail in time; he can count on the police to be on his side if they initiate force, so he can just smile and sell them their goods. When people have abandoned reason, when they believe they are the exclusive owners of truths that cannot be reached by means of reason (or "reason alone"), when they decide that "unbridled" reason is a threat to their point of view, when they find that reason (and ultimately reality itself) can be "misleading," they do not feel that confidence, and they seek to suppress contrary opinions. If they cannot do it through the government, then they can do it through their own private property, but if they don't see the problem doing it with their own property, they will not see the problem with using the government to do it. So, in that sense, saying "it isn't really censorship if they're using their own private property" is true, but it's not addressing the root of the problem. The real problem is that people have abandoned reason -- and without reason, the distinction between merely using their own property and using government force to go beyond it will be abandoned, too. It's only a matter of time. (Actually it has already been abandoned. The separation between usage of private property [i.e., economics] and government powers [i.e., state] has never been formally recognized and has been on the way out for decades; however, it cannot be upheld unless reason itself is upheld.) The notion that "free speech is dangerous," that "free speech corrupts people" and so forth, is coming from both political parties. Because of its widespread popularity, even if you do not see it affecting government policy now, it is going to affect government policy sooner or later, unless it can be exposed as the mistake that it is. Exposing the mistake -- and defending free speech as such -- requires a defense of reason.

They may be able to get the evidence elsewhere. Or they may already have it. Or they may have at least seen it so they know what I'm talking about. I didn't reach my conclusions by having privileged access to information that no one else could have seen. I reached them by means of information that was available to many people at the time. Other people will have seen the same information.

That's a non-sequitur. I may have seen a judge's ruling but be unable to find it. You are free, if you wish, to disagree with me on the basis that I can't find proof, but you are not free to demand that I withdraw my argument merely because I'm unable to prove it to your satisfaction. Someone considering my argument might have better abilities to find the rulings than I have. Nor does my inability to find some piece of evidence or other "prove" that I am irrational or even that my argument is. By such a standard, every rational person would be required to maintain a properly indexed library of everything they have ever seen or heard, so that they can provide proof of all their beliefs on demand. That's absurd.

I have tried to do some basic searches on the Internet and I believe the results are heavily filtered. The thing is, I can't find any information whatever that the "mainstream" media believes to be false, unless the mainstream media is quoting it for the purpose of rebutting it. The only things I can find are things they would deem true. It's far too perfect. In a free country, or on a free Internet, I would expect to find conflicting points of view, just like I would expect to find books in a bookstore which contradict each other, like Rand and Kant. I used to be able to find such things on the Internet, too. Different groups might argue with each other, but each group would have a place where it could speak for itself, and you could use your own judgment to decide which group was correct (if any was). What I'm seeing now is more like when you go into a Christian bookstore and there are no books at all that are critical of Christianity or have anything bad to say about it. They may have disagreements about other issues, but every book says Christianity is great. You wouldn't find atheist authors like Rand in there at all. Somebody who only had access to such bookstores would also have a hard time finding "evidence" that there is anything "wrong" with Christianity. (They might find contradictions, however, either between different pieces of Christian literature, or between the literature and the real world. But they'd have to talk about them in hushed tones, and only with people they could trust.) The same thing happens if you go into a bookstore in a Communist country. There are no books that have anything bad to say about Communism or about the regime. Maybe that's why I can't find any evidence. Paradoxically I'd be more inclined to believe "Trump's claims" were false if I could find them in their original form and find other articles about them that explain why they are false. Instead, all I find is the latter. Like I said, it's far too perfect.

AlexL, I must rely on reputable commentators who are able to sort through the news lies, and in my considered opinion such are Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.), John Mearsheimer, Ray McGovern, and Seymour Hersh. In the first third of Macgregor’s latest (May 3) interview he talks about the war and says the Ukraine battle losses are ten times those of Russia: A massive Russian offensive is terminating Ukraine

Short memories people have, and how msm can spin on a dime for 'expediency'. Their names reel off: Reuters, BBC, CNN...These same Ukraine neo-Nazis who in 2014 were condemned widely by them, are now celebrated in Congress/Parliament/etc.. You are promoting Putin's propaganda to point out this glaring lapse. Some are asking if a lot of Westerners recently became 'nazified' by association/conviction. https://open.substack.com/pub/askeptic/p/the-msms-ukraine-amnesia?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I think the thing which sets Objectivism apart is its amenability to non-deterministic causation/action flowing from absolute identity. Things behave according to their nature, lawfully, but not all things do so strictly in a deterministically Leibnizian manner. Free-will is not the ability of a person to choose against his or her own nature/identity in some arbitrary way, but the freedom to choose from a number of possible choices perfectly consistent with the person's nature/identity. Free will is non-deterministic but not completely arbitrary.

There are ample grounds for saying the 2020 election was stolen, but the Democrats keep trying to sweep the evidence under the rug by saying it's "illegitimate" to consider it, and by conducting ad hominem and other attacks against people who do consider it. The Democrats frequently object to anti-fraud measures because they equivocate between intimidating people from carrying out legitimate activities and intimidating them from carrying out illegitimate activities. Putting police in a store to prevent shoplifting is "intimidating," but if it's done properly it should only intimidate actual shoplifters, not ordinary customers. Take the police away, though, and shoplifting becomes rampant, as exemplified by Democrat-controlled cities. The same thing happens with election fraud. The Democrats oppose any measure that would make such fraud more difficult, such as requiring voters to show ID. That is not intimidation except to people trying to get away with fraud. Another example of equivocation is where in Arizona a law against tampering with voting machines was used by Democrats to prevent the inspection of a voting machine after the election to see if it had been tampered with. So instead of preventing fraud, the law was used to abet it. Another example is that the reason the Constitution requires election results to be approved by Congress and the Vice President is precisely so that if there are any suspicions of fraud, there is another chance to deal with that fraud. These approvals are not supposed to be mere rubber stamps. Having these procedures (and the courts) be rubber stamps only ensures that people who do commit fraud can be sure of getting away with it. Of course, Democrats think they have the right to commit election fraud; every now and then there's another university professor saying so. It's fairly common for Leftist professors to say that sort of thing. Why not take them at their word, at least insofar as believing they believe it? Most of the court cases brought by Trump failed because of judges refusing to look at the evidence on the grounds that it would be "catastrophic" for them to overturn an election -- on any basis. Such a point of view also only serves to ensure that people who commit fraud can be sure of getting away with it. (It would not have been necessary to simply declare Trump the winner; there is plenty of time between early November and January 20 in which to run and tally another election. This would put any fraudsters in the position of having to repeat their crimes while being under greater scrutiny than last time.) The "insurrection" on January 6 was basically a Reichstag Fire. My evidence is that (1) the Democrats were the only ones who could have benefited from it, (2) there was never any chance that it could benefit anyone else, and (3) the question of who would benefit would have been evident to the people planning the event before it occurred. The original Reichstag Fire was staged by Nazis; the Nazis blamed it on their opposition and used it to consolidate their power. The Democrats have done the same thing with theirs. A few gullible Trump supporters were apparently among the participants in January 6th, but although much attention has been drawn to these participants, there has never been any clarity concerning who organized and directed the whole thing, and I think this has been for a reason. I think it's clear that Trump did not organize it. Trump had good reasons for believing he had been cheated out of the election, he didn't know how to prove it, and even if he could get proof, there wasn't a court he could take it to. Still, it wouldn't make sense for him to have asked small groups such as the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys to overthrow the government for him. They are too small; there are not enough of them. (And most of the people who went into the Capitol on January 6th were not members of these groups, and were unarmed and were let in by police, who by the way were under the command, not of the President, but of Nancy Pelosi, since she was Speaker of the House.) Nor did his speech on January 6th constitute a call to the general public to overthrow the government. He just asked people to exercise their First Amendment rights. The Democrats have already won the contest, and we do have a nascent dictatorship. That is the problem.

I think at least in the 'chat bot' versions of "AI" it's like having all the 'words' in text as weighted tokens and the prompting computes an algorithm and outputs a 'response', the discernment being the the running of the algorithm on the data set. I don't imagine it 'sees' or 'knows' the prompts are different from the responses ? A vaguely remembered anecdote, I think about John von Neumann describing what could be done with accumulating the largest and most detailed data set of the particulars of the atmosphere , an almost perfect digitalized 'copy' of the world's atmosphere and how that would facilitate answering questions of atmospheric science and concluding that the data itself would be useless, as the same questions would remain. Chat bots that 'speak' without prompting is what to look for , and I don't think that is yet (?)

A recent fine composition from Marc Champagne: Kantian Humility and Randian Hubris?

I'd like to add another link to a paper (2019) examining the Gibson affordance concept in perception: On the Evolution of a Radical Concept: Affordances According to Gibson and Their Subsequent Use and Development.

An objective reality must exist in order for there to be truth and falsehood. To claim "objective reality does not exist" is a statement which is true or false. Also, it is stated in such a way that proving the statement requires proving a negative which can only be done by inventorying the Universe and determining that every last corner of it is non-objective. If that could somehow be accomplished, that would immediately create at least that one objectively true fact and the effort refutes itself.