punk

In most countries history is extensively edited to make that country look good and everyone else look bad. This is one of the reasons that American History as taught in public schools is abysmally boring. A result of this is that people find history in general to be boring. My recollection of lows in American History from school: War of 1812: I never really understood this war at all until I read about it later and discovered America basically lost Mexican War: There was the Alamo and then somehow we bought the Southwest. It really is hard to make annexing half of a foreign country look good. Spanish War: Something about a battleship blowing up. Its hard to make taking over someone's empire look good. Then history of course seemed to always end at 1945. A nice high point beating the Nazis and all. Korean War: America lost, hard to make that look good Vietnam War: America lost, hard to make that look good I wonder if history classes now end in 1991 since America won the First Gulf War? Face Americans are ignorant on plenty of history that foreigners would be appalled at.

Advertising exists to create desires where there were none before. As an example, people lived millenia without deodorant. When deodorant was introduced, people did not snap it up as quickly as possible. Advertising had to create the demand for deodorant until know it is considered a necessity for any civilized American to have it. But not every nation in the world sees deodorant as the necessity American's do. I have not promoted the elimination of advertising. In a free society people are free to advertise as they want (no matter how hideous and cluttering they choose to make it be). I was promoting the critique of advertising to make people conscious of how it works and how it manipulates them. I know some people here think they are too smart to be manipulated by advertising, but they should look around their home and see what name-brand things they own and really ask themselves if the name-brand is really that different from the alternatives. I think everyone will find they are guilty of buying due to brand identification in some areas. Do you like Coke more than Pepsi? Are they really all that different? A story: Once upon a time Coca Cola decided to change its recipe. It had done extensive tests and determined people liked the new formula a lot more than the old formula. Coca Cola had changed its formula many times in the past without peole really noticing. This time though Coca Cola decided to advertise that the new formula was much much better than the old one, and that they were replacing the old formula with it. Coca Cola consumers were outraged. They felt betrayed. Coca Cola sales went down noticably. Eventually Coca Cola rereleased the old formula as "Classic Coke" and the new formula as "New Coke". People were happy. The brand was saved.

I don't think an essay of the form "America is better than everyone else" is really the way to go. There are serious problems in America, and this is becoming increasingly apparent to everyone. The point of the essay is to make Objectivism an avenue for improvement of American society. The comparison to the rest of the world is distracting from this. To a student population I'd bring out the fact that Objectivism has a critique of the currently existing American economy. Things like: 1. corporate welfare is wrong (as you mentioned) and Objectivists oppose this 2. corruption should be strictly opposed in application of law (addressing Enron, WorldCom, etc.) 3. other things about the current Republican party Objectivism opposes (religion, moral regulation etc.) Then bring out critiques of liberal policies (i.e. we dont agree with Republicans totally and we don't agree with Democrats either) 1. emphasizing groups over individuals 2. popular welfare is wrong 3. unnecessary regulation is wrong etc. It would also be good to address environmental issues (this is an obvious issue today) and give an Objectivist solution to these problems.

I think the current style of adds promotes the popularity of welfare schemes. Ads promote a feeling of entitlement to the product ("you deserve this", much more often that than "you've earned this"), or even worse to portray the product as a "necessity". I think this has seeped into the general unconscious so that people think they deserve all sorts of things, and if they dont have them its an evil society keeping them from these necessities.

I think in America today we have: conservative: pro-corporate welfare, pro-regulation of personal conduct liberal: pro-popular welfare, pro-regulation of business So I'd say I was neither. I recall the critique of bad business practices in "Atlas Shrugged" struck me a little more than did such a criticism in "The Fountainhead" (I have in mind here the scene where the railroads collude to eliminate competition, effectively driving whats-his-name out of business, sorry it's been years).

Here some mathematical definitions of infinities (actually the term is "transfinite numbers"), and yes there are more than one infinities: aleph-0 : the set of all natural numbers {0,1,2,3,...} c: the power set of aleph-0 (that is the set of all subsets of aleph-0) [this is the same as the set of all real numbers] It can be shown that c does not equal aleph-0, that is to say there is no bilinear mapping between aleph-0 and c (colloquially the reals have a higher cardinality than the natural numbers). In general the power set B of a set A has a higher cardinality than does the set A itself. So we can take the power set of c and produce another higher "infinity" and so on.

"Existentialism" as it is normally used is one of those nice catch-all categories academics like so much so they can classify a bunch of people as being of a similar mind and not bother to actually read (or view them for visual artists, or listen to them for musicians) them in depth. Strictly speaking the only one of them who actually called himself an "existentialist" was Sartre, the rest (at least those alive when the label came into existence) refused it. The gist of their ideas is: 1. A realization that most of what comprises and bounds an individual's view of the world are merely social norms and have no absolute validity 2. A realization of the absolute freedom the above implies and a stark terror of this freedom 3. A feeling that there is no absolute meaning to assuage this terror, and that the only meaning that is left is what the individual chooses to give to things 4. A resolve to face this now meaningless existence in all honesty without hiding from it

How about "Yule". We already have references to "yuletide" (yule time) this time of year anyway. http://www.candlegrove.com/yule.html

I commend the existence of forums such as those you listed, and I hope they flourish. A criticism of these forums though (and if you want to pursue this, aspect a new thread really should be created) is there is a tendency to a knee-jerk pro-business attitude. Businesses today do engage in activities that violate the ideals of capitalism. These activities can and should be criticized by objectivists using Objectivist philosophy. However as this thread has shown such criticisms are treated as anti-capitalist by knee-jerk conservatives rather than pro-capitalism. I do not believe Objectivist views will make much real headway so long as they do not incorporate a criticism of business violations of the Objectivist capitalist ideal. Here is a more formal criticism of branding in philosophical terms: 1. All communication encompasses a set of philosophical premisses 2. Advertising is a form of communication So advertising/branding is communicating philosophical ideas to consumers. I contend these ideas are inimical to rational thought. Objectivists will rant and rave about some academic philosopher or public interest group promoting irrationalism, but when businesses are promoting irrationalism the knee-jerk pro-business conservatives will keep their mouths hypocritically shut.

One aspect of "branding" is the promotion of a feeling of "entitlement" for the product. That is the mindset that one deserves the benefits that the product in question provides. So in effect "branding" promotes the feeling of entitlement among the people you are complaining about supporting with your tax dollars.

In any legal system one is going to get both the guilty that go free and the innocent that are wrongly convicted and punished for a crime. In practice the more we work to minimize the number of innocent who are convicted, likely the more guilty will go unconvicted.... Anyway in practice there will probably be a number of people falsely punshed for a crime. Question: How should an objectivist society treat a person who has been shown to have been falsely convicted and punished? Should the person be just set free, or should they be compensated by the government? (I guess I'm assuming an objectivist society would have prisons)

Unfortunately most Americans don't appreciate what "innocent until proven guilty" really means. The fact is that most juries approach a case in the mind of "guilty until proven innocent". Most people seem to think that if a person is arrested for a crime then that person must be guilty, so if the person goes free then it must be a failure of the justice system. Personally I think the "Vigilantism" thread elsewhere on this board displays this same mind frame.

To be fair, in my inital post on this subject I did disavow most of what AdBusters does beyond its philosophical critique of branding. So, at no point have I supported them whole-heartedly. It would be very nice to see more philosophical critiques of things like branding from a pro-capitalist perspective, but to my knowledge they do not exist (please correct me here, I'd like to see some). I agree that the problem is with ourselves. The problem, however, will not be corrected without effort to publicly raise awareness and criticize the phenomenon so that people will be more savvy of it. AdBusters is doing this and no one else is right now.

Well you all have given me something to think about. I've enjoyed this. Just some biographical notes to give some idea where I'm coming from: *I have read "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology", but it was years ago. I probably should brush up on it if I am going to continue with discussions of this nature here *My graduate work in physics was as an experimentalist, but between undergrad and grad I did quite a bit of study in Formal Logic and Computation Theory, and now I do software. I think the approach I have taken here reflects that background.

How does one actually *know* someone is guilty if it couldn't even be established in a court of law? One point of due process is to get at this epistemic question of *knowing* someone is guilty. By assuming you really *know* guilt outside of a process of legal investigation is to drop half the issue. The point is the vigilante never really *knows* in any reasonably good way that the person they are killing is guilty. They might think the person is guilty but it hasn't been established in any sort of way that the general public can recognize that what the vigilante does is legitimate.

"Leftist" and "Rightist" and their counterparts have become next to meaningless in political discourse. They are the sort of terms politicians use to gather support without actually commiting to anything. A better example of this sort of thing is "Family Values". A politician can come out and say they support "Family Values" without actually specifying what that actually means. This leaves voters able to each assume that "Family Values" means just what they think it does and that their views agree with the politician's. Politicians due this since they know that if the commit to anything specific they will alienate some group of voters. I usually assume "leftist" to mean some advocacy of state intervention in the economy regulating business and providing popular welfare. I don't see how being anti-consumerist falls under that. The question in consumerism is whether people find their own self-worth within themselves, or outside of themselves in terms of what they consume. I believe you would agree with me that there is something repugnant about a person finding their own worth in consuming things. No?

But since: 1. all of our theories are only valid in certain domains 2. when a theory is replaced by a new theory in a wider domain, that new theory often provides a radically different understanding of the phenomenon that quite often that the conceptual understanding of the old theory was wrong, and the conceptual understanding in the new theory doesn't really apply to the old theory (take Coulomb's Law versus QED), that likely for all our theories except for the latest bleeding edge ones there is no correct conceptual understanding of the formalism. And it is quite likely that the conceptual understanding of the bleeding edge theories is likely wrong as well. So we are left with zero correct interpretations for physical theories in reality and at most one correct interpretation in principle. I understand where a conceptual understanding is required to do theoretical physics, given that quite a bit of theoretical physics is not rigorous mathematics, so the theorist has to go with concepts rather than rigorous methodology. It just doesn't seem philosophically required in specifying what a physical theory is. I dont see where you need more than a formalism and data it compares well to. And where we can find structures within the data that is fine to consider, but structures which occur in the theory but not in the data, I have trouble granting meaning to. But I am interested in understanding your position. I'm not being deliberately contrary.

I dont know about property anymore. I was watching a program on Public Access about abuse of eminent domain laws. Essentially local governments would declare privately owned areas "blighted" and take the land (I am not clear on the terms of how the city compensated the people) and then turn around and hand the land to some developer or business that wanted the land, ostensibly to increase tax revenues.

I agree. You are right, I stated it too tersely. But still there is no explicit mention of business. Capitalism is neither pro-business nor anti-business. Business is free to do what it wants (within the bounds of what was required by capitalism), and we are all free to ignore business.

A mathematical formalism by definition has no requirement for an interpretation. That's what a "formalism" is. It is simply a set of symbols with a set of rules by which one can go from one set of symbols to another set of symbols. Also a mathematical formalism in physics can describe multiple physical situations depending on the "interpretation" given the symbols (I'm sorry, I'm not sure what word you would prefer instead of "interpretation"). So the same differential equation can describe many different physical models. Moreover there have been cases where the same formalism for the same physical situation has been subject to various interpretations from various physicists. Let's take Maxwell's Equations. We no longer view them using the interpretation Maxwell used in developing them. Or Schroedinger's Equation where many of the arguments he used to get there are now considered faulty. The formalism stands since it corresponds with observation where various interpretations come and go.

Lets draw a distinction between capitalism and consumerism. Capitalism is a system of government designed to maximize freedom by minimizing government intervention. Notice there is no mention here of business or the promotion of business. Consumerism is a view of life where-by a person tries to find value in life through material things. I am absolutely in favor of capitalism. I believe in freedom. Personally I abhor consumerism. I buy what little I need as I am free to do in a free "capitalist" (I use the scare quotes because america has rather a ways to go to really be capitalist) society. I am under no obligation to belittle my life to make the economy go 'round. My life is my own. Personally I advocate the same for others. I would never force them, nor would I ever consider making the government legislate such a thing. I think AdBusters and "No Logo" in making people look closely at consumerism are doing a good thing.

To clarify (which I think you already figured out), I was using "theory" to refer to the mathematical formalism alone. So my version of "theory" would be a mathematical formalism which produces predictions which can be compared to physical measurement. And of course a good theory makes predictions very close to what is measured. You seem to prefer the idea that a "theory" is a mathemtical formalism which makes predictions which can be compared to physical measurement but which also has a clear interpretation. And my guess is that an interpretation should map structures within the theory (beyond the predictions) to structures in the physical world, and that these structures should meet certain criteria such as obeying causality. Please correct me if I misunderstood. My view is that the interpretation part cannot be applied to the theory itself but can be applied to the set of predictions (which are assumed to in principle be comparable to some physical measurement). So if we take the set of all predictions we can find structures which should correspond to structures in the physical world, but structures within the formalism which do not show up in the predictions have no meaning in the interpretation.

It doesn't take much to separate the wheat from the chaff if you only try. The critique of advertising is something to take in. Quite a bit of money goes into branding because it is an effective technique. Personally speaking if someone is investing vast sums of money to influence my decisions, I take a great interest in it. The goal of branding is to make people make purchasing decisions for emotional reasons. Capitalism functions rightly when people make purchasing decisions for rational reasons. For that reason alone branding is at odds with capitalism. But it must be viewed as an unavoidable evil as speech should not be regulated As for "buy nothing day"... What is the problem? If a bunch of people choose not to buy anything on a particular day, they are well within their rights. Capitalism is about personal freedom.

I notice the assumptions are: 1. The "guilty" party is known for certain to be guilty 2. The state is failing to properly punish the guilty party So the question is whether it is right for the vigilante to do justice in place of some inefficient government. The purpose of due process of law is to establish guilt through well-defined transparent means in a public forum so that everyone in society (in principle) can be satisfied that the party in question is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Vigilantism rests on a presumption of guilt. In America (and any right functioning legal system) there is a presumption of innocence. Guilt must be established through due process. Innocent people do get accused of crimes and brought to trial. Due process exists to minimize the number of these innocent people that actually get punished wrongly. Vigilantism is very likely to result in innocent people being wrongly punished, and as such is itself morally wrong.

Perhaps it would be better to say that where a theory predicts a measurable infinity then one has approached the end of the range of validity to the theory. One view of mathematical physics is that it aims to predict measurements, and it is only these which need to be justified against the structure of the actual world. Anything else which occurs in the process of making the prediction can be taken as purely computational in nature and should not be justified against the physical world. That is that these things can be thought of as elaborate versions of the "carrying the digit" as we were taught in elementary school where when adding 14 to 16 we do the following: 1 16 + 14 ______ 30 Thus the carried one has no physical meaning it is just an artifact of the algorithm.