oso

It sounds to me like the hero of a misanthrope.

Being severely mentally ill does not mean that you are brain dead. Brain death and severe mental illness are two completely separate things. Brain death means complete end of brain activity, meaning no consciousness, no potential for consciousness and therefore plain death. The only reason a brain dead person's body would be kept alive is to make sure that they are dead or to preserve their organs for donation.

The barrel length of rifles is regulated differently than the barrel length of pistols so it is actually necessary for the government to have precise definitions of what constitutes a rifle and what constitutes a pistol. As I understand it, if a firearm has a stock or a fore-grip and a rifled barrel, it is considered a rifle and it therefore must have a barrel length of at least 16 inches. Also, once a firearm is manufactured into a rifle, it is always a rifle. This means you can't cut the stock off of a rifle then shorten the barrel. Under these definitions the first of the firearms pictured below would be considered a pistol while the second one would be considered a short barrelled rifle and therefore potentially illegal without the proper paper work. I don't know if the FBI uses these legal definitions in their statistics but an officer trying to enforce firearms laws would need to know the government definitions.

"In order to calculate a country’s overall “happiness,” the economists at NEF look at three things: the life expectancy of its citizens, experienced well-being, and the ecological footprint." Trying to measure happiness statistically is already a futile effort without trying to impose the size of someone's "ecological footprint" as a factor.

I've leaned against trees more than a couple times in my life and never have I looked anything like that while doing so. That is definitely, a tense, awkward way to lean against a tree (try leaning your head and a shoulder against a wall with your arm stretched out). Depth also isn't very clear. Ignoring the bottom fifth of the painting and the couple branches that are in front of her, the painting looks to me like it is of a woman standing in front of a painted canvass. Either way, I still don't get what your point is.

Only if you think that the government or the people of a nation have a collective right to the entire country and all property within it. The government's only proper role is to respond to initiation of force. It doesn't have the right to, for example. block a company from hiring and bringing over Chinese engineers because the majority of people feel that they shouldn't be allowed. That would be a violation of the rights of the immigrants and the company. It would be the exact opposite of locking the door of my house. It is my and no one else's right to control what happens with it and who is allowed in. Blocking immigration of innocent people establishes the exact opposite principle in that it means that people don't own their own property or have a right to control it; the collective nation has a right to decide who is allowed upon it and you can't do anything without the consent of the true owners, represented by the government.

It's not directed at anyone in particular, it is what Hairnet is saying the author imposes as the only two alternatives anyone can choose from. "You" is in reference to all human being. Hairnet is being sarcastic in saying he "loves that".

He sued and won large amounts of money from people who attempted to expose the truth. Whatever the legitimacy of anti-doping rules or the magnitude of his achievements regardless of his doping, extorting money from people for telling the truth is unacceptable.

The only thing that could have been taken as offensive was the interjections of basic philosophic ideas. Knowing your intended audience, they make more sense.

Try this: http://www.peikoff.c...the-human-race/ You should also ask yourself, what makes something an ultimate value/an end in itself? Aristotle would answer, that that thing must be “that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else," and he's right. The only thing that fulfills those criteria is happiness. The fact that the nature of life and the universe has resulted in organisms that have a tendency towards passing on their genes, does not mean that passing on your genes is any sort of value. Values need to be of value towards some individual. Any alleged value that is independent of living organisms would require some sort of supernatural explanation.

It's absolutely insane; motivated by nothing but the desire to out the gun owners they demonizing. It's obviously irresponsible and these kinds of actions are a small part of the reason that the government shouldn't have this information to start with. I can only imagine that the reason that this information is public record is the malicousness of lawmakers. This is evidenced by a Conneticuit politician who wants to make this kind of thing legal in his state. He hides his motivations, saying he wants to "open the conversation" by passing that law. I'm glad most of the rest of the country doesn't have any sort of licensing or registration so insanity like this is only possible in a few states, for now.

The government only has a monopoly on force used for the purpose of exacting justice. For example, it has the right to prevent me from executing a murderer I have caught and tied up, but it does not have the right to punish me for subduing a murderer who has broken into my home. Both are uses of force, but only the former is retaliatory force.

The state doesn't return adults to people's custody.

Automatic weapons are not necessarily indiscriminate. Police and military use sub-machine guns for operations such as hostage rescues. They use the automatic function to quickly put several rounds on targets, using short bursts of fire. They're really not much different than any semi-automatic weapon in function. One fact that will attest to that is that sub-machine guns have largely been replaced with compact assault rifles, which are used in semi-auto mode. The reason people don't use the automatic function of assault rifles is actually the inability to discriminate. It's still possible to discriminate, but your ability is reduced, and that is always a bad thing, whether you are a criminal, a law abiding citizen or attempting mass murder. With firearms, the ability to discriminate is always desirable, because you only have limited rounds and you want to be able to discriminate between your target, and things like the ground and walls around your target. If you try using the automatic function of an assault rifle, you will probably waste rounds. It doesn't increase the effectiveness of the rifle in any scenario. The only time automatic fire is used both effectively and indiscriminately is with true machine guns. These are weapons designed to cover large swaths of area in which there might be enemies, but you don't know exactly where the enemies are. If you knew exactly where the enemies were, you would be better off using semi-auto. The purpose of the machine gun in this scenario is to suppress the enemy's movement and ability to take aim as well as possibly hit the enemy by chance. This is not a purpose that I can see being useful in any criminal scenario short of raising a small army to fight against the government. Overall, I think any special regulations against assault rifles is completely useless. Restricting sub-machine guns is not justified because they are not particularly dangerous, but do allow people to defend themselves slightly more effectively in certain scenarios. I could, however see regulation of machine guns being kept at current levels because they are not completely benign (when compared to semi-autos) and they don't have any real self-defensive purpose. Once you get into the realm of explosives, gas, bio-weapons, etc. regulation is justified by reasons including, their use at least posing an implicit threat to people in the area or the impossibility of using them for their intended purpose without violating rights as well as their mere storage posing an implicit threat to people in the area.

What about automatic weapons makes them offensive, and not defensive weapons? Are you sure you know enough about firearms to come to that conclusion? For example, did you know that the US military trains it's riflemen never to use the automatic function of their assault rifles? It's because it is too uncontrollable and depletes ammo too fast to be useful in any situation. The only reasonable conclusion in this case is that the automatic function of assault rifles is completely benign. Other types of automatic weapons are less cut and dry but it's definitely wrong to say that all automatic weapons are purely offensive.

There will never be any large scale society composed 100% of Objectivists. No matter how dominant a philosophy might become, it will never reach everyone. To the extent that more of the world and your country embraces Objectivism, the size of government needed to protect rights would be reduced, but it would never go away. There will always be criminals. Even in a society akin to Galt's Gulch, you would need a government to arbitrate disputes caused by one or more honest parties making mistakes in judgment. Also, philosophy can't cure mental illness.

Accusing someone's belief in an ideological issue of being based on culture is a baseless ad hominem. It's especially worthless when attempting to use it against people who already defy ideological norms by rejecting altruism and embracing a philosophy that prevents education through osmosis. Well, you can't even try to use it against me because I'm a Canadian, who wasn't raised around guns nor around a particularly gun friendly culture. My beliefs on gun control are entirely my own. As for Ayn Rand's view, it's funny that you start agreeing with her when she expresses uncertainty and basically says "I don't know" and then claim that she is somehow supporting your view. As I’m sure you agree, Ayn Rand can be wrong. The right to self-defence entails a right to do what is necessary to defend yourself and sometimes that will include killing. Also, any right to self-defence implies the right to the means to self defence, just as the right to life implies a right to property. The reason this issue is so cut and dry is that any law that outlaws concealing guns can only possibly affect law abiding citizens because if you plan on concealing a gun in order to rob or murder, then you will never care about the penalty for carrying. As for how to reconcile self-defence with preventing people from killing at whim, first of all, you make killing people at whim illegal. Second, you make carrying in public require a permit, which would only be issued to people without serious criminal records or mental issues and to people who are trained in the use of handguns. It's just the same as how you reconcile productive transportation with preventing people from using cars to kill people at whim. The most important issue here though, is that people are generally good. That's why you don't hear about random hit and run murders. That's the reason why despite the millions of people in America legally carrying handguns, very few commit any crimes let alone senseless murder. You’re right that if the United States were turned into a dictatorship, gun crime would likely go down but that alone doesn’t justify any of the measures you suggested. Reducing the amount of murders is not the standard when it comes to the justification of government action. The standard is whether a government action violates or protects individual rights. As explained in the last thread, there is no such thing as your “conflict of rights”. When a government takes an action which violates rights, it is always wrong and robbing good people of the right to self-defence is definitely violating their rights. It’s also not a guarantee that dictatorial gun laws will make significant dents in the amount of guns in the hands of criminals in which case everyone is left a soft target. Even if you do somehow manage to eliminate next to all guns (this is me bending over backwards), the people are still left defenceless against the few criminals with guns left, the government, and all crimes committed with knives or bats or fists. As for changing the culture such that anyone who owned a gun would be looked at as a weirdo, how could you possibly justify that? You would have to make the case that it is inherently wrong to own a gun, for any reason, regardless of how safe and responsible you are. You would need to attack, not only the hobbies of hunting and target shooting, but also the virtue of taking responsibility for your own safety. You would need to attack the idea that a populace ought to be prepared for the possibility that their government will degrade into tyranny. The fact is, the only way to attack these things is by focusing on individual misconduct and it’s impossible to justify a stigma against gun ownership in general because it is possible to own guns responsibly and for good reasons. The American gun culture is rational. Any middle ground between freedom and banning guns will do nothing at best or quite likely cause more crime. That's because anything short of dictatorial laws, such as the laws you suggested as palatable to Americans, will not do a single thing to prevent criminals from getting guns. Gun control such as automatic weapon bans, the recently expired Assault Weapons Ban, and the recently abolished gun registry in Canada, are examples of gun control that does absolutely nothing but placate liberals and violate rights. Any law that disarms good people can only do harm. The most obvious is creating so called “gun-free zones”, whether they are on the scale of a nation, or a school. All they do is disarm good people, making them soft targets for any predator that doesn’t care about a sign or the law. The massacres you’ve seen in American schools and the rise in crime rates in Australia are the price of being “gun free”. Good people with guns make society safer.

I think he was referring to a society with Objectivist politics, not a society fully composed of Objectivists. Also, I think he was proposing banning nuclear weapons from civilian usage (as they obviously already are), not from the military.

Fortunately, there are generally adults present at elementary schools.

What does frugality have to do with the essence capitalism?

I really like this popular song.

*accidental post

I could do it, particularly if I was participating in a firing squad instead of a lethal injection (I dislike the idea of lethal injection). There's no such future in any career path I'm pursuing but, for example, if I was in the military in the past and they asked for volunteers to participate in the firing squad of a man tried, convicted, and found guilty of heinous, murderous crimes beyond a shadow of a doubt, I would consider it. My reason is simply that there are some people who do not deserve to live. The motivation of the executioner need not be any different than the jurors who decide the verdict and reccomend the sentence or the judge who hands it down. It's all a matter of justice. As for the actual act of killing, I'm personally put off by the methods of hanging, gas, electrocution and to a lesser degree, lethal injection, but I don't see the specific act of justified killing as particularly undesirable, certainly not disgusting, as you put it. I'm glad there are other people out there in the prison system who volunteer to carry out justice and presumably are not bothered. I don't see any basis upon which you could accuse these people of having psychological problems. As for your the link you gave, it does not prove that capital punishment is immoral, just that there needs to be strict codes of law which prevent it from being pursued except in cases of utmost certainty. I don't know the specifics of how those codes would be written, but I don't doubt that they can be written.

As far as I can tell, this is a site for people to discuss Objectivism with those people naturally being predominantly, but not exclusively, Objectivists and students of Objectivism. Saying, "This is... not "Anything Goes" Online" seems to imply that it's wrong for anyone who isn't an Objectivist to post here.

The Tea Party supported Allen West, who narrowly lost.