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Some time back, I tweeted a Value for Value post by Peter Schwartz which explains how our culture's dominant ethical code, altruism, justifies supporting Hamas over Israel, despite the demands of justice to do exactly the opposite. Schwartz says in part:Certainly, a growing anti-Semitism is at work. But the more fundamental explanation is the one provided by a schoolteacher in Atlanta, as reported in the Nov. 5 NY Times ("Across the Echo Chamber, a Quiet Conversation About War and Race"). She posted the following message on Facebook, defending her unequivocal backing of the Palestinians against Israel: "The actual history of this situation is NOT COMPLICATED. I will ALWAYS stand beside those with less power. Less wealth, less access and resources and choices. Regardless of the extreme acts of a few militants who were done watching their people slowly die." She is stating the essence of a moral code that is accepted by virtually everyone today: the code of altruism. According to that code, need is the ultimate standard of morality. If others are in need, nothing else matters -- you have a duty to satisfy their needs.Now that Iran, a nation nearly ten times more populous than Israel, has more directly waged war against Israel, it would be interesting to quiz the above schoolteacher about which side she is on. I would not expect her allegiance to have shifted, despite the fact that Israel had enough help repelling that attack that it is a fair question whether it could have done so alone. Absent the ability to ask directly, we can get the answer by consulting a recent Brendan O'Neill article article at Sp!ked. It is titled "How Woke Leftists Became Cheerleaders for Iran," and I think the below is crucial to understanding why we're seeing mass "demonstrations" by people claiming to be in favor of this warmongering regime's "right" to "self-defense:"The left would say, Don't believe your lying eyes or mind about this evil man. (Image via Wikimedia Commons, license.)The Western left's blaming of Israel for everything, and its implicit absolution of Iran, is grimly revealing. These people seem to view Israel as the only true actor in the Middle East, and everyone else as mere respondents to Israel's actions. Israel is the author of the Middle East's fate, while the rest of them -- Hamas, the Houthis, even Iran -- are mere bit-part players with the misfortune to be caught up in Israel's vast and terrifying web. This is identitarianism, not anti-imperialism. A new generation of radicals educated into the regressive ideology that says 'white' people are powerful and 'brown' people are oppressed can only understand the Middle East in these terms, too. The end result is that they demonise Israel and infantilise Iran. The Jewish State comes to be seen as uniquely malevolent while Iran is treated as a kind of wide-eyed child who cannot help but lash out at its 'Zionist' oppressor. Israel is damned as a criminal state, while Iran's crimes against humanity are downplayed, even memory-holed. This is where wokeness leads, then: to sympathy for one of the most backward and repressive states on Earth on the deranged basis that its criminal strikes against Israel represent a blow against the arrogant West itself... [bold added]The whole idea that all of Israel is Caucasian or that the Islamic world is entirely brown-skinned is nearly as ridiculous as assuming that race determines character or as using white as code for oppressor and brown for needy or oppressed. If anyone needs disabusing of the notion that the left stands for racial equality or individual rights, what we're seeing unfold -- the use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to excuse racially slurring Israelis as white (which is a racial slur coming from the left these days) en route to enabling their extermination -- should concern anyone with a grain of rationality or a sense of justice. By casting the alleged neediness of Palestine and Iran -- and Israel's well-earned strength -- as racial attributes, the left has excused making the mindless siding with terrorists in the name of altruism permanent. They're coming for the Jews now, and they will come for the rest of West as soon as is convenient. We're all "colonialists" now, according to the left, anyway. -- CAVLink to Original

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

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

It goes way beyond ‘interesting’, it enters the territory of morally imperative. There is a plain contradiction in Oliver’s position. The media (NYT) bears a responsibility for turning this personal discussion into a propaganda event, it then has carries that responsibility to defend the oppressed in the present case. (*Crickets*). Of course, that presumes that the purpose of the media is to objectively report facts rather than advocate a particular ideology. Occasionally, a rational commentator will notice one of these contradictions and will write about it, as Schwartz did. What should be said is that the NYT has a responsibility to put this very question to Oliver – unsympathetically, in the same manner that they address others whom they deem to be politically incorrect. Attention needs to be put on the media for its reporting bias. However, to be effective such attention would need to be itself objective. This then reminds me of a recent Gus blog where Gus interjects a comment that “Trump’s Supreme Court appointments eventually overturned Roe vs. Wade”, which is misleading (he appointed only 3 of the majority justices, and that statement carries the false and unsupported implication that this was Trump’s reason for those appointments). It’s fine to pick on Trump, but let’s see some actual facts, not just mystical divination about the mental state of voters and guilt-by-association reasoning. Now, hitting rather close to home, there has been a chorus of crickets over the fact that the Trump faction in the House at least temporarily limited some of the right-trampling power of the FISA courts. This action was taken with the full approval of Trump, and yet where is the laudatory commentary? So yeah, we can understand this in terms of a hierarchy of values. Truth is a value; but Trump is a greater disvalue; ignoring a relevant truth is less evil than making an false assertion or implication. Some media elevate the ‘Trump is evil’ axiom to the point that they will make literally-false statements, but that is not so common because of defamation law (though certain media are statutorily immunized against such actions). A safer bet is to rely on false implications (which can still be a cause of legal action, just easier to summarily dismiss). When silence is available, that is a completely un-actionable method of promulgating the viewpoint that Trump is evil. To be clear, Trump is evil, my point is that the philosopher’s job is focus on the logical infrastructure of political discourse, and to point out these contradictions. We cannot in all honesty demand adherence to logic if we also repudiate logic. The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum.

Over the weekend and from its own territory, Iran launched a barrage of hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, using Israel's attack on its "embassy" in Syria as an excuse. I recommend Yaron Brook's real-time reporting and commentary (embedded here). I was out running errands when I began listening. Any time I checked, I found him to be well ahead of other outlets both in terms of timeliness and quality of information. The whole thing was barely a blip in mainstream media, and even sites like the Drudge Report were somewhat late. At one point, Brook noted the issue with the most military significance at present: Iran doesn't have the nuclear capability it has been trying to develop. This attack could have been far worse, and harder to deal with if that had not been the case. And after this weekend there is no doubt that this scenario must be averted, in the minimal form of the destruction of Iran's nuclear weapons facilities. Ideally, the West also does whatever it can to topple the murderous, theocratic regime behind the attack and decades of terrorism and proxy conflicts. See also "End States That Sponsor Terrorism," by Leonard Peikoff. As became apparent during the podcast, the need to end Iran's nuclear capability is a point many in Israel seem to grasp, as the following, quote of former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, tweeted by Open Source Intel would indicate:Some points regarding the overnight Iranian missile attack on Israel:Contrary to what pundits are saying, this wasn't designed merely as "bells and whistles" with no damage. When you shoot 350 flying objects timed to hit Israel at the same moment, when you use three fundamentally different weapon types -- cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and UAVs, you're looking to penetrate Israel's defenses and kill Israelis.The US administration is telling us: "This is a victory, you've already won by thwarting the missiles. No need for any further action." No, it's NOT a victory. Yes, it's a remarkable success of Israel's air defense systems, but it's not a victory. When a bully tries to hit you 350 times and only succeeds seven time, you've NOT won. You don't win wars just by intercepting your enemy's hits, nor do you deter it. Your enemy will just try harder with more and better weapons and methods next time. How DO you deter? By exacting a deeply painful price.It's incorrect to say "nobody got hurt". There's a 7 year-old Israeli-Arab girl called Amina Elhasuny fighting for her life. That's who coward Khamenei hit. The Islamic Republic of Iran made a big mistake. For the past 30 years it's been wreaking havoc on the region -- through its proxies. A terror-octopus whose head is Tehran, and its tentacles are in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Gaza. How convenient. The Mullahs send others to conduct horrendous terror attacks, and die for them. Other people's blood. Israel's strategic mistake for the past 30 years was to play along this strategy. We always fought the Octopus' arms, but hardly exacted a price from its Iranian head. This should change now: Hezbollah or Hamas shoots a rocket at Israel? Tehran pays a price. The enemy is the Iranian REGIME, not the wonderful Iranian people. The Iranian regime reminds me of the Soviet regime in 1985: corrupt to the core, old, incompetent, despised by its own people, and destined to collapse. The sooner the better. The West can accelerate the regime's inevitable collapse with a set of soft and clever actions, short of military force. Remember, USSR collapsed without any need for a direct American attack. Let's do this. Israel is fighting everybody's war. In Gaza, Lebanon and Tehran. We're considered "the small satan" by radical Islam. America is the big one. I'll be clear: if these crazy fanatic Islamic terrorists get away with murder by hiding among civilians, this method will be adopted by terrorists worldwide. We're not asking anyone to fight for us. We'll do the job. But we do expect our allies to have our back, especially when it's tough -- and now it's tough. Be on the right side and help us defeat these horrible and savage regimes.That army of useful idiots -- the ninnies who are worrying about "escalation" -- are ignoring what happened on October 7 and over this weekend: Iran has already escalated unprovoked twice, and is going to escalate again, anyway. Its threats of doing worse if Israel retaliates are superflous and should be ignored, because these theocrats plan atrocities, genocide, and tyranny regardless of what we do. This is war. We should fight it on our own terms. This attack on Israel is a proxy attack on the West by dogs that smell fear. Let's snuff out these animals while they are still weak. -- CAVLink to Original

Plainly, this forum has degenerated to the point that intellectual honesty is no longer a value

These Hours of Resonant Existence

"The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum." David Odden

I see the term "anti-value" used a few times on this forum, but "anti-virtue" isn't as common. There is no such thing, of course. Productivity is a virtue, even if someone else doesn't like the product. Hitler and Marx produced books by practicing the virtue of productivity. Whether the books are morally valuable to someone else is irrelevant.

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

Conspiracy theorist.

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

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

It's possible, today in the US-C of A, to live healthily to a hundred or more. I, myself, have a healthy-hundred as my goal. At 74, I'm as fit mentally and physically, overall, as the usual 64 or younger (even with the poor start of my malnourished childhood in the poverty of Maoist China). Whatever one's age or condition, one could live more healthily and longer. See "The Five Doctors" and the Comment following it. The key to a healthy self and a longer life is to be healthy every day in every way for the rest of your life. A healthy self is integral to the continual betterment of one's life-long self-knowledge and self-realization. Could this help you to "tie in [your] selfish subjective experience/relation to . . . objective reality"?

Monart, By we in this context, I mean only the combination self and other. On day of birth one is already immersed in other humans around one. Indeed, before birth, one was already immersed in the human thing that is one's mother's voice. I reject the view, often put forward by classical empiricists, that one performs an inference to know there are other humans, things like oneself, with inner life. Although, at the beginning we have no language, so no articulation of any of that in mind (and we have only begun to develop powers of memory.) I'd have to look up when we get the idea of we. (We begin to use the personal pronouns "I, me" at age two.) But as adults or near-adults, we can examine our elementary episodes of consciousness and know there is a pronominal other in all of them, an element that is accessible if we turn to that feature in our consciousness, and by adulthood, we know the "we" in those episodes. This presence of other forming the we in all human consciousness perhaps contributes to many peoples' sense that God is with them. If so, that is just a mistake; the presence with themselves is other humans, taken in an open unspecified pronoun-type way. My viewpoint on this, I later learned, had been put forward by some existentialists last century. However, they were engaged in an archeology of subjectivity, whereas in my system, existence standing independently of apprehension and comprehension is the objective prize we are joined with by other. I'd like to mention also, concerning the Objectivist metaphysics, that it was not "Existence is Identity" that Rand posed as a corollary of "Existence exists." It was something else, something one could infer if one were making the statement "Existence exists." The thesis "Existence is Identity" can be argued to be something fundamental about Existence, and it can be shown that under Rand's various categories, looking to deny "Existence is Identity" lands in contradiction, and is therefore false. The thesis "Consciousness is identification" is also not a corollary, but a definition of what is the most fundamental sort of consciousness, with any others, such as in dreams or perceptual illusions, being derivative with respect to the fundamental consciousness. Philosophers of mind today have called success consciousness that type of consciousness Rand took for fundamental. Rand’s “corollary axiom” with “Existence exists,” you recall, runs this way: “Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists” (Rand 1957, 1015). The counterpart in my system: ‘Existence exists, we live’. The act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. Rand erred in omitting express, elementary knowing of aliveness of self and others in elementary knowing of consciousness. Rand did not omit altogether elementary knowing of aliveness in elementary knowing of consciousness in her mature philosophy, although that elementary nexus is not highlighted. Some sort of impossibility of mind without life is affirmed later in the speech when Rand writes of the alternative “your mind or your life” that “neither is possible to man without the other” (1957, 1022). Then too, when something she wrote in Galt’s speech “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept ‘Value’ possible” (1013) is joined with something else in the speech “A rational process is a moral process” (1017), it could be inferred that, at least in higher, rational consciousness, its aliveness is implicit in its episodes and this fact is reflectively accessible within such consciousness. Also, in oral exchange years later, Rand remarked concerning consciousness: “It’s a concept that could not enter your mind or your language unless in the form of a faculty of a living entity. That’s what the concept means” (ITOE App. 252).

Jon needs to be immediately banned. I did it once and it needs to be permanent. He is extremely evil, anti-intellectual and is against all that is good in the world. He is explicitly one of the most evil people alive.

This. And whoever put a laughing emoji to Gus’s post needs a ban as a laughing supporter of evil.

I understand that there are a million details, but the point is that the principle of allowing a totalitarian dictatorship that is the principle creator of virtually all terrorism in the world to exist and continue its actions against anyone at any time, let alone semi-free nations like Israel and our nation, regardless of how it can be "defended against" is appeasement of evil and is why it ( 😉 proof of hacking domestic terrorism as I type this out, but don't derail) this has continued to occur and will continue to occur and get exponentially worse. Especially, a rights violating terrorist dictatorship like Iran potentially possessing nukes. Peikoff wrote after 9/11 that "states" that support terrorism need to be ended, we didn't do and things keep getting worse and will continue getting exponentially worse as a function of time. Ending totalitarian dictatorships that are the source of terrorism, mass death, and evil, while enslaving their own population while attempting to enslave and/or destroy the entire world is the only moral action especially when they start explicitly attacking semi-free free nations and/or threatening their existence not to mention the existence of the world itself.

Ayn Rand lived long enough to discover and present an immense system of thought as that guide you seek. If Stephen lives to a hundred, he may write a magnum opus to also help you further along.

This is brilliant, innovative, and inspiring. It stimulates wonder and reads like metaphysical poetry. I'm fully engaged and in resonance with it as I marvel at it.

For a brilliant, innovative synopsis of all Existence, see the new These Hours of Resonant Existence by Stephen Boydstun. It reads like metaphysical poetry.

He's not trying; he's going full tilt. And yet, he thinks that teleology is false. That's a rather odd thing: he claims that something untrue is, in fact, true. It's quite unintelligible, from an Objectivist framework, why someone would ever want to do that. But temporarily switching to Mainländer's standpoint might remove some of that unintelligibility. I suspect that most people (but by no means all of them) would simply yawn if someone told them that atoms tend towards stability. This is because human beings are not computer chips; they are teleological beings, whose constitution is specialized toward value-based frameworks: "want", "avoid", "like", "dislike", "seek", "fight". Suppose we said, instead: "Atoms behave just like us. Humans work to make lots of money, to have a stable and comfortable life. Same for atoms: they too fight to become stable." It's probably safe to assume that many listeners would find themselves involuntarily drawn to this story - even if they never cared about atoms before. Now, consider the following: The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, And drinks and gapes for drink again; The plants suck in the earth, and are With constant drinking fresh and fair; (*) Here, it's quite obvious for all readers that the poet is not actually claiming that the earth is thirsty. Notice, however, that the poem is true all the same. Give some water to your plants, and you will observe that the earth is, truly: very, very thirsty. So thirsty! Equipped with this new standpoint, here is Mainländer - the philosopher whose metaphysics is teleological - lambasting someone who took teleology to be literally true: "You teach a teleology that cannot be thought of as more comprehensive and terrible. You assume millions and billions of miracles every minute, and you, cruel romantic, want to throw us back into the dark Middle Ages, i.e., forge us into the dreadful chains of the physico-theological proof of the existence of God. You philosophize as if Kant were yet to be born, as if we are not fortunate enough to possess the second part of his Critique of Judgment. Do you wish to be a serious man of science, an honest researcher of nature? Do you not know that absolute teleology is the grave of all natural science?" - Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Vol. II., p. 570) And now we can revisit Mainländer's claim that the function of the world is to destroy all useful energy. Does the world really pursue that goal, or in fact, any goal? Probably not. Does everything unwittingly contribute to entropy, as if the world pursued its own demise? Yes. The judgement is true, just as the earth is, in fact, thirsty. Long before I discovered Objectivism or Kant, I was spontaneously creating regulative explanations of the world for myself. At no time did I believe those explanations to be factual; their factuality was beside the point. They satisfied my soul -much more than any dry descriptions of facts. Briefly put, a regulative judgement does not merely communicate facts; it makes those facts sink deep into your skin. It can turn something like entropy into a worldview that makes people be at peace with tension and chaos, and more mindful of what's worth pursuing and what isn't. And that's one way philosophy can contribute to human happiness.

Too much of it. Fortunately there came to be philosophers not in that cascade. One of them made high virtue of keeping the trains running on time. By the way, the most productive theoretical work to come out of ancient Greece, I'd say, was Euclid, not Plato-Aristotle nor even the syllogistic.

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. According to New ideal, the Ayn Rand Institute is promoting a booklet titled Finding Morality and Happiness Without God, and quotes author Onkar Ghate:The basic reason religion remains such an esteemed aspect of American society is that it is considered important, even indispensable, to morality. The strongest form this idea takes is that morality depends on religion -- that without God, the distinction between good and evil loses meaning, and anything goes.Mentioning happiness in the title should intrigue the more active-minded: Thanks to religion, most people associate fear and guilt with morality, and are reluctant if not afraid to think about this life-and-death topic. We can blame the all-encompassing cultural stranglehold of religion for the fact that, while the true purpose of morality should be a huge sales advantage for Objectivism in the marketplace of ideas, it will cause suspicion for most. I think the exeception I noted above will more than offset the current disadvantage, since those who will be intrigued will inlcude some future intellectuals. 2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn advocates the free market as the solution the medical care crisis caused by Canada's government-run system. She outlines what this might look like in part:The very small percentage of people who could not afford to pay for health care or insurance would depend on private charity, and the quality of care would be protected, not only through competition and rights-protecting laws, but by private third-party licensing/certification. Healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses, and others) benefit from private health care because competition among providers would enable them to negotiate fair compensation and working conditions, which in turn would attract more professionals to health care and eliminate staff shortages and burnout. The private healthcare providers (hospitals, clinics, professional practices) and medical insurance companies benefit by profiting from the quality and competitive pricing of their services.It is worth noting why Woiceshyn goes into such detail: The lack of truly private systems worldwide makes "envisioning how such a system would work ... difficult." 3. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney addresses an interesting question that I'd put as What is the difference between a habit and an internal (psychological or mental) context?Image by Ping Lee, via Unsplash, license.Thanks to the influence of behaviorism, the term "habit" is commonly used to subsume a wide range of repeatable or regular behavior, regardless of the cause of such behavior. The problem with this is that different repeatable, regular behavior can have fundamentally different causes. Psychological concepts need to be defined in terms of fundamentals, i.e., by means of root causes, not superficial similarities. For this reason, I limit the term "habit" to automatized perceptual motor skills, i.e., physical actions that happen automatically in response to awareness of a particular kind of environment, unless you intervene to stop them.This is an important distinction: bad habits and unhelpful contexts make desirable self-directed action harder, but because they have different causes, combating or replacing them requires different approaches, which Moroney discusses throughout. 4. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger considers the common claim that the United States is a "representative democracy." The most interesting part of the piece to me was the following:[Confusion on this issue is] because one needs to use the right method of concept formation. The right method allows one to validate one's concepts, rather than merely picking one term from those available.Picking one term from those available is ubiquitous today, and explains lots of what is wrong with the current political discourse. And that means not just that practically everyone falls into it on at least some issues, but it can be easy for those who don't to forget or be unaware that that is what often happens. This can affect how best to argue for a good position. The rest of the piece is highly instructive, both for its demonstration of the correct method of approaching the question and for its answer. -- CAVLink to Original

SL, There is a widespread good in people of wanting to know the truth. Aristotle thought that even ALL people desire to know (the truth). One widespread thing people want to know today, as thousands of years ago, is what becomes of one's inner self and that self of one's loved ones when we die. Is it really just the absolute end as it might appear from the successive states of the deceased body, or is there future life, perhaps one brighter or darker than the earthly life (and for some an opportunity to sell post-death prizes and penalties for power and money in earthly life)? Decline the fake insurance policy of Pascal's Wager. Prize the truth come what may. As for widespread desire for protection against dangers, the main danger is not from interpersonal conflicts, but from nature. Getting to the discoveries and developments that can rescue one or one's loved ones from this or that particular occasion of bodily catastrophic failure (mostly from disease or old-age cascades) is not helped by prayers and blaming death on human moral failings, but by rational investigations into nature. I mention this vast sort of danger due to Objectivist-types' widespread knee-jerk salience of dangers from interpersonal conflicts as first concern among dangers and politics as top aim. There are plenty of religious people with whom I form political alliances. More importantly, religious friends and family and I (I purely naturalist, atheist) love each other very much. Those are choices open based on common values, including the value of truth, even as one keeps straight what are one's differences on what is true and how to get it. Nietzsche became so popular in the culture of Germany in the 1890's and up to WWI that there were some theologians serving up bowls of unity between Nietzsche and Christian religion in Germany. When I was first in college ('66–'71), there was Christian Atheism of Altizer.* More recently and probably more durably, there is The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007).

His "principle" is popularity. His position is always what is going to make him look "big".

"Buffoon"? Who cares how he comes across - and although of another nationality, I care very much about America's future direction and particularly its moral stance. When Trump says of something, "That's a bad deal!" - what does that say? A bad deal is surely when you get less out of something than what you've put in. In other words, losing a greater value for a lesser; In short, self-sacrificial altruism. Why, I can't understand, has this central aspect never been picked up (that I've seen) by Objectivists? For whatever his (very likely), businesslike pragmatism, your president has one overall principle, and that's to pull back the USA from further descent into its dutiful sacrificial altruism, which all other nations have taken as 'a given' for so long. Make no bones about it, beneath the enraged/scornful opposition (we get here too from our self-righteous Left-liberals) they ~know~ what's going on. No one will mention, or always explicitly understand, the basic ideology at stake, but this unbelievable, unceasing opposition to Trump, especially the hatred seen from the loathsome CNN, can't be taken any other way. It shows me their fear, and that a threat to their altruism is implicit in whatever they're doing. Like I say, what do I care about what he says, or acts like. We are feeling his shakeup in many places in the world, all to the better.

In other words, Trump has that in common with the people Binswanger used as examples in his essay that you linked. But those what are called "normal people", non-intellectual ordinary Americans whom we know Rand was a great fan of because of their "sense of life" as she put it. Rand was frustrated by America's non-intellectuality but she didn't disapprove of the country because of it. Trump as president is like the common man as president, and her opinions of the common (American) man are probably the most relevant to Trump. I haven't seen much commentary on Trump's sense of life, but that is really what got him elected. His optimism, his vivaciousness, his high energy, his guilt free enjoyment of life and his immensely entertaining Twitter taunts all make him tremendously appealing. But these are non-intellectual factors and incomprehensible to someone committed to rationalism as a professional duty. That would be many ARI people and often Binswanger.

Alright, I'm going to riff this piece, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style. The piece is enough of a joke, might as well joke about it. Except for Odd Thomas, and the ARI. lol Well obviously, Trump loves Russia and Rand was from Russia. Makes total sense to the fake news mindset. Whole, as in "all." Quite a wager considering that Trump agrees with Objectivism on quite a few key political goals... preserving the 2A, repealing regulations, repealing Obamacare, standing up to the Global Warming fraud, destroying radical Islam instead of making excuses for it, etc. So what does our prophetess have to say exactly, Mr. Ghate? She obviously didn't foresee the rise of the Internet. Except for Ron Paul, a far more intellectual and principled candidate than Trump, which the ARI opposed because... uh, why exactly? A limit which apparently led for her to vote for Nixon, a far worse candidate than Trump, over McGovern, a far better candidate than Hillary. and who channel a dead woman... oh wait, that's the ARI. Yes, the first candidate in 30 years to not thank God in his acceptance speech, and who says that he has "nothing to be forgiven for" is a "mystic." He might as well be a closet atheist who pays lip-service to religion because politics and votes. No, what's illuminating is your attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. You mean like government-sanctioned torture, or the Waco raid? That sort of justice? None of which are evident in Trump's decades of honest business dealings, Mr. Ghate would assert. If he had been a Madoff-like crook, surely evidence for it would have arisen by now. Apparently calling out fake news represents "disdain for the truth." Ah, Anderson Cooper, a bastion of journalistic integrity. Because he's not a liar. Apparently YouTube viewers don't count. Apparently respect for women involves denying one's own sexuality and the beauty of the female form. Ghate would have us equate spur-of-the-moment tweets with Trump's considered opinion. No, it's because none of the things you just mentioned were lies. Actually it captures basic marketing principles. The defenders of capitalism sure don't know much about how business works. Says the ARI, an organization which hired Carl Barney, former Scientology church owner and current college swindler, and takes his dirty money. Obviously they would assert that they only hired him because people can change. Well then, we had objective evidence that Trump no longer desired to be part of the swamp and only had to be in order to run his business effectively. Apparently concepts like slogans and the process for choosing them to reach mass appeal are alien to the ARI. No wonder there are so few objectivists. And apparently unless you constantly repeat those things, your own inherent goodness means nothing. "It's true because I want it to be true" actually perfectly captures the tone of this hit piece. I'd rather have a man who acts moral but never talks about it, than a man who never acts moral but preaches how moral he is. Fine people want to preserve their history for the sake of remembering, not tear it down for the sake of nothing. Not every person defending the confederate statue at that rally was a neo-Nazi. No other president actually stood up to North Korea and forced China to play nice. I'd call that quite an accomplishment. In addition to the hundreds of regulations that Trump has repealed. If Ghate and Brook had their way, Hillary would be president and these would still be on the books. Don't forget about Jesus and Buddha while you're making your fake list of people who Trump never said that he's better than. Or, you know, it was a joke. Yes, how dare he be loyal to America first instead of globalists. I guess that Trump's business achievements count for nothing. As opposed to the objective thing to do, which would be to hire men who would betray him. As it should be, given Comey's lack of fidelity to justice in the case of Clinton. What you're hearing is patriotism towards America, not tribalism. I know, it's hard to recognize for a member of an organization like the ARI that puts Israel above America. And Hillary apparently would've played no part in this drift. Political hucksters rely on strawmen, such as saying that Trump blamed "all" the country's problems on any particular group. By this logic we should never elect a county sheriff who pledges to crack down on criminals. That would be tribalism, apparently. You mean like Hillary calling half the country "deplorables?" Oh look, a nugget of truth! You're forgetting some qualifying adjectives. Illegal immigrants, dishonest journalists, globalist "free" traders, and corrupt elites. Trump opposed none of those things intrinsically. Sales should be soaring, but the ARI fails at marketing so they're not. With funny names like Floyd Ferris, Wesely Mouch, and Onkar Ghate. You mean like how Leonard Peikoff squandered Ayn Rand's intellectual heritage? That sort of progeny? I'd trust a snake oil salesman like Alex Jones before I'd trust Anderson Cooper or wherever Mr. Ghate gets his "news." And by letting in the entire Third World into America all at once. She also advocated that, apparently. America to Israel, America to globalists... just kidding, he doesn't say that. So this is what makes you happy? Writing baseless schlock about the president? What about the Convention of States? Oh wait, the ARI hates states' rights. I mean, I think that she would have said that too, but not in the way that you mean. After all that bloviating, this is the best you could come up with that Rand might have said?

Yeah, it's nice to meet you, too. Honestly, and people wonder why there aren't more objectivists when this is how we treat each other. Flaming is not fun at all. Who wants to join a philosophy where your own fellow compatriots treat you just as terribly as they'd treat a welfare parasite? If you actually want to have a civilized discussion about this, then I'm all for it, but I don't think you're open to changing your mind anyway. But for now I will say that whoever you import has no "right" to vote for a socialist party. Or, preferably, no right to vote at all.

If you get between me and an immigrant/foreigner who I want to trade/associate with on my property, you can just plain fuck off. I don't care what philosophy or "objectivism" you think you've modeled, your "right" to force me can go to hell.

This is the key point. I should have used the term individual rights to stay within the established jargon for Objectivist discourse on rights. And yes i do stress the "formal". Rights are a principle from Objectivist ethics. The concept of rights is most often used in a political and legal context, but it should not be forgotten that rights are an ethical principle. You say rights are primarily legal (perhaps because of usage?), I would say rights are essentially ethical because of the epistemological derivation and justification. I agree that rights are about action within a social context. "Social context" is not equivalent to "legal context". It is wrong to obtain values by lying, but not every lie can be made illegal. The reason for that is law ought to have strict requirements for objectivity. A man might maintain multiple girlfriends by lying, girlfriends who would not agree to be one of a harem if they knew of the others. A man may not maintain multiple wives by lying because there is an explicit legal agreement of monogamy in marriage. In the first example, who is a girlfriend or not and who is regarded as a girlfriend or not and even what it means to be a girlfriend are all subjective mental states of the participants. The law cannot sort out what should be done in this case because there are no objective facts to work with. The law can work in a case of multiple marriages because the status and obligations of the participants are objective. This is an example where ethics can say what is right based on rights but the law must remain silent. The range of situations and contexts which are amenable to legal rulings on rights is necessarily less than the range over which ethical judgements can be made based on rights. This is because of the more stringent requirement of objectivity for a legal context, and also because legal systems have jurisdictions, defined finite geographic regions of power and of citizenship. With respect to warrants, they are a procedural limitation on law enforcement actions with the goal of protecting rights. Warrants are not themselves rights in any ethical sense. It is necessarily valid that different procedures may apply to citizens and non-citizens if the idea of citizenship and jurisdiction means anything at all because in a reduction-to-concretes sense those differences are what it means to be a citizen or not.

This is unsubstantiated. Since this is a disagreement, you'd need to go a step further and cite a source. I can't find evidence to say you are wrong unless I know how you got information that's different than mine. I don't think there is any evidence that assimilation is as pervasive an issue as you suggest. But then there is a racist claim as part of your reasoning. You say Third World culture is based on reason. That's fair. But how does that mean the immigrants who leave are a cause of that. They're -leaving- that country. The only way I see to suggest that immigrants from those countries worsen the US due to being from there. In other words, this reasoning is tribalistic (and such tribalism isn't tolerated for long 'round these parts). Your line on the Chinese is probably most racist of all. Ok, pamphlets. This is a far cry from an attempt to invade. Jurisdiction. It's a practical extent to which rights-protection is feasible. As long as the people in the jurisidiction respect rights (invading armies and rights-violating criminals aren't those) their rights out to be protected and defended. But my issue is that here you are saying Mexico is a narco-terrorist state based on apparently fears of how those Mexicans, will -of course- be parasites, criminals, or savages.

There are 30 million people here illegally, probably more. Not even Crackpot Kim could hope to muster up such an army. While not every member of this "army" takes welfare, commits crimes, brings disease, or refuses to assimilate and learn English, a huge number of them (millions) do. Would you agree that criminals, welfare parasites, diseased people, and people who will not learn English do not belong in this country? Considering that in Mexico, the government runs ads on the streets encouraging people to come to America, I would consider that very good evidence of an invasion. Mexico does not enforce their side of the border, in fact they even offer legal assistance to people who are going through deportation procedures. The wall will help us determine who is a threat, and who is not. It will force them to only use the gates. Otherwise they'll just swim the Rio Grande or cross the desert and we have no idea who they are. Mexico is literally at war with cartels, and there is no way to stop the cartels from spreading here. Which they have. Individuals of this country, not individuals who are citizens of Mexico. If the proper role of government is to protect the rights of individuals of any country, why not invade Mexico and force their government to provide basic human rights to their citizens instead of being a narco-terrorist state? Because most of you listen to the so-called Ayn Rand Institute and its Ayatollahs, Brook and Peikoff, without thinking for yourself. Ayn Rand herself never advocated for unlimited Third World immigration. Why? Because it is not in America's national self-interest for its people to be overwhelmed and replaced by people from the Third World who Ayn Rand called "savages." I'll pimp HandyHandle's website here because he says it far better than I could... http://ariwatch.com/AynRandOnImmigration.htm

I voted for him just to prevent the socialist disaster that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been. His stances on the campaign trail and what he has actually done in office are incongruous in many respects. The Syria strike was a big disappointment, as are many of his appointees' neocon blustering against Russia. It is still too early to say what ultimate impact he will have, however his biggest accomplishment thus far is appointing Justice Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Hillary would've given us another Ginsburg. Then you could've kissed goodbye to the Second Amendment. Trump has also stepped up border enforcement, and illegal crossings are down. The proper, objective role of government is to protect the homeland from invasion. You can't do that without border enforcement. We are being invaded by criminals, thugs, and welfare parasites and if the only legislative accomplishment that he gets done is building the wall, then it will be worth it.

His Twitter account suggests otherwise.

Well, no. There is no evidence that there is any invasion of by criminals, thugs, or welfare parasites. That's just a Trump belief, not a fact. Invasion applies to warfare or coordinated attack. That some illegal immigrants commit crimes is not good evidence of an invasion. Besides, the proper role of government is to protect the rights of individuals. If invasion occurs, there needs to be evidence that those invaders are violating rights. It's not really defense without a plan to improve identifying threats. This is what most of us would say here I suspect.