thenelli01

Most often, I'm right because I get into fights with the likes of Crow and Kate. All I have to do is state the opposite of whatever nutty nonsense they come up with.
 
I'm gonna try and challenge myself a little more in the future. I already have Crow on ignore, so that's a step in the right direction.

I earned a 4.0 last semester while working ~30 hours a week.
 
Also, I recently ran 4 miles in <28 minutes. That is a big accomplishment because I could barely run a mile in 8-9 min at the start of spring. That will go away though because I am starting to bulk up this week.
 
And this is my 400th post  .

I earned a 4.0 last semester while working ~30 hours a week.
 
Also, I recently ran 4 miles in <28 minutes. That is a big accomplishment because I could barely run a mile in 8-9 min at the start of spring. That will go away though because I am starting to bulk up this week.
 
And this is my 400th post  .

I think Edward Snowden made the point perfectly, in his Guardian interview: your communications and financial activity is all stored and cataloged by the government. No one reads it, of course, because frankly they don't care. But, it is stored and ready to be accessed and used against you if needed.

We don't have to become North Korea before someone uses it against you. It could be used against you even today. And not because you've done anything wrong. All is required is the mere appearance of wrongdoing, and your career, business, government or private contract, public image, etc. can be compromised.

Not only that, but the people who do it will probably even get away with it, especially if they're high enough on the food chain. There are almost a million people with access to this info. Snowden, a simple employee for a private contractor, had access not only to the data, but even the court orders authorizing it. It's a massive bureaucracy, and, as we've seen many times in the past few years, it's pretty much impossible to hold wrongdoers accountable within it.

I'm not the "oh lord Jesus, 1984 is here" type, but as someone with a. some controversial political and personal views and habits and b. with ambition to make something of myself, the fact that most things I say and do have been logged and are available for query, worries me. Not because I fear a coming dictatorship, it worries me even if things don't change much.

This still misses how force *literally* controls a person. If you shove a person, they will fall regardless of what they had planned to do. Indeed they might react after the fact, but shoving would still be force. I suppose some fancy footwork prevents crashing to the ground, which doesn't change the fact that outcomes are being controlled. Furthermore, a chosen act of force is different than an act of nature to the extent that reasoning is based on how the world works, but reasoning under force is based on how the initiator wants the world to work. Going into examples like a gun to your head, physical means are being used to control outcomes regardless of your thoughts and regardless of the state of the world as it is. If you walk away, you'll be killed, no matter what you think or reason about. Although your entire rational faculty has not been disabled, your "sphere of freedom" has been reduced. There are still options.
 
Peikoff gives a good explanation in a very full way about force in one of his "Objectivism Through Induction" lectures. "Moral Rights and Political Freedom" by Tara Smith is excellent as well.

And?  Islam is not compatible with itself!  Its holy book contradicts itself numerous times, much like the Bible.  In virtue of this, I fail to see why Islamic scholars who accept western values are being more contradictory than your extremists.  They are all picking and choosing verses they like, interpreting away those they don't, in order to glean a consistent worldview out of contradictory source material.  I see no reason to accept the idea that one set of them is 'more serious' about ideas or about their own religion than the other.  And that's certainly not why we would label one group 'extremist.'

Yes, really. If you subject the two sets of values to a rigidly rational evaluation, the conclusion is that Islamic and western values are not compatible.
You have to compromise and neglect parts of one or both, before you can subscribe to them simultaneously. You can't be a faithful servant to God and embrace freedom at the same time. It's a contradiction.

Lol. And you of course base this piece of financial advice on the above described theory, by which FoxNews's viewers are the driving force behind the global gold market.
 
Never mind the fact that China and India are by far the largest consumers of gold, and that the US demand (even taken as a whole, jewelry, technological and investment demand), makes up only a small fraction of the global demand for gold.
 
You do at least realize that the prices of commodities are driven by supply and demand, not FoxNews, right? And that China and India (which have made it clear that they intend to stabilize the price of gold by slowing purchases as necessary, not crash it) can easily offset any kind of rise in supply caused by your imaginary FoxNews watching gold hoarders, simply by buying a little more than normal? 

Success at what? At love? work? relationships? gaining knowledge? sports? painting? hobbies? 
 
The statement that you seek success suggests that there is something you do value. I agree, seeing a doctor may be helpful. However, in the mean time, there are plenty of activities you can do to help you cope with stress. Stress is hard to deal with when you have one thing on your mind at all times. You need to find other activities that you genuinely enjoy doing and you need to take time out of your day to do them. Mine, for example, is working out. If I didn't work out (through boxing, weight lifting, running), I'd have trouble dealing with stress too.

A guy claiming to be a Rand fan once told me that Objectivism ought to include a God component -- a mystical even irrational component. He topped off by saying "after all 'rational' is contained within 'irrational'"

Eh, there was nothing substantive in that attack. It was a rant filled with empty insults.

You are talking about fiat currency. This topic is about Fractional Reserve Banking. It is *not* a discussion on fiat currency. Nobody here would support the notion of a fiat currency. So, as usual, you're simply arguing against a strawman: an argument that nobody has ever made here.

No, rights violation is just one moral aspect, the only one relevant to the legal issue. You could do all kinds of stuff to a fetus just prior to giving birth to it with full intent of having it live a full life that would still be horrible. You could, for example, cut their eyes out just before birth and leave them to be blind for what will most likely be forever on. I'm not saying circumcision as it is usually done on males is this extreme and obviously debilitating, just that lacking rights doesn't mean anything goes morally necessarily.

I suspect people earning over $1.3 million will be moving then.

Fixed.Time for a little science. Please, sit back and observe as I put this little hypothesis of yours to the test:
God Damn Jehovah Jesus God Damn Bloody Christ Virgin Mother Damn. I also worship the false Hindu Goddess Lakshmi, and I'm as we speak coveting my neighbor's wife, manservant and ass, all three at the same time. And, four days ago, I photo-shopped an erect penis into Jesus's right hand. Wasn't his, either, it was a different color. And yes, your math is correct, four days ago does in fact fall on, oh noes, the holy day of the Sabbath.

That's gotta be at least a dozen violations of your imaginary God's imaginary moral laws. So where are all the consequences I supposedly set in motion? Anything? Anyone? Bolt of lightning? Satan with a pitchfork behind me? Nope, nothing's happening. My neighbor's ass has a worried look on his face, but other than that, everything is exactly the way it was before the experiment begun.

Moralist, would you please stay on topic for once? You're not even remotely on topic.

No. It does matter. Objectivists don't agree that murder and theft are morally wrong on the basis of face, Christians who attribute those moral laws to God do. Ayn Rand was a great mind, but there was nothing divine about her. We agree with Objectivism, not because of Ayn Rand, but because of the reasoning behind her ideas.

So my question for you is this: what happens to the cost of servicing the 16 trillion dollar U.S. debt at that point? Currently, interest rates and yields are very low, which makes it easier to service the debt. In addition to this, the act of lowering interest rates involves the Federal Reserve buying up lots of government bonds, increasing demand, therefore increasing the price and lowering the yields (the cost of servicing these bonds). So what happens when one of the largest purchasers of U.S. bonds decides that it must not only stop buying government bonds, but turn around and start selling them itself? What happens when one of the Treasury's largest customers must become its competitor, to stave off high inflation?

From where I'm standing, at that point, with the Fed's previous demand for bonds gone, and in fact a larger supply of bonds, bond prices fall, yields go way up, and the cost of servicing our debt suddenly doesn't seem so insignificant. We need a plan for long-term restructuring of entitlements now, such that we can cut the debt burden before we are forced to by the sheer expense of the debt.

No they aren't and no it doesn't. Lots of killing isn't murder or even immoral. Killing weeds in a garden isn't murder. Using anti-bacterial soap doesn't make one a mass-murderer. It isn't murder to remove a cancerous tumor. Periods aren't murder. Killing somebody in self-defense isn't murder. You'll have to provide some more support for your claims.

I'm gonna shoot from the hip here, and declare war on some of these overused military metaphors. Let's drive them out of their foxholes, and mow them down with a rapid fire of literal sentences that express exact ideas. And, after that initial salvo, let's put some boots on the ground and aim for the overused metaphor's ideological ally, the cliché (phrases like "there are not guarantees in life", "play an honest game in life" are the foot-soldiers of the enemy known as intellectual laziness).

Your faith in this system as well as the difficulty you have in seeing any validity on the other side stem from this mistaken belief that any macroeconomic systems are "empirically testable." By their nature, a controlled, let alone a blind or double blind study is completely impossible. At best you may draw conclusions from similar circumstances in similar countries and at worst you may draw your conclusions from computer simulations, but neither of those imparts anything close to the scientific certainty you pretend at or even attempt to answer for the massive opportunity cost lost in each signature on a US presidents desk.

You don't lack a 200 level economics class as much as a class on critical thinking or even a decent book. To make the claims about our current economic model(note the word model) as though it were facts that you are dealing out is to equate alchemy with chemistry and religion with philosophy. It's not in the same realm as science. At best it is an art that might one day lead to an actual scientific understanding of economics but it is certainly not that now. This is why Ayn Rand and Objectivists generally do not argue against your paradigm on empirical grounds but only on the moral terms.

She is wrong to say that QE isn't "inflationary" though. Although the inflation isn't showing as heavily in the price level of goods and services, the inflation is showing in the bond and the stock market. Those are two bubbles that are just waiting to pop.

At least part of the gasoline price is not market related. It is money which has been arbitrary added to the price and which supposed to be used for the roads' maintenance . Even if it's true, it's still a robbery. You intention is to buy gasoline only, not to pay for roads. This payment is extracted from you by force, by the power of state which arbitrary connected these two payments in one package deal. Therefore it's not voluntary payment. It's similar to VAT ( value added tax) which you pay when you make any purchase. Nobody calls VAT voluntary payment on the ground that people have a choice not to engage in any economical activity.

No, they are not exercising freedom in the sense that Rand meant to be primary: i.e., the freedom to exercise their individual rights. They are exercising force. Not sure what point you're trying to make here.
Back on the topic of "meritocracy", even if it is not *rule* by merit, but just getting what merit brings, it can be used as a basis for arguments for wealth-redistribution. Consider this example: consider a small frontier town and focus on
* Two of them are capable prospectors and miners, who have had some small past successes
* One is a prospector and miner who is not very good at what he does, but he is willing to work hard
* A fourth is a lazy fellow who's always trying to bum drinks off the other three
The first three (the miners) set out to find gold, in an un-mapped, unexplored area, going in different directions because nothing is really known about the area anyway. Unknown to them, there is only one good deposit. Now, before they left, they could have formed a partnership, agreeing to share any find, but they didn't. After a few years, one of the good miners finds that deposit.

If we grant that two of the miners had similar merit, and if we want a system that gives reward to merit, we will start to argue that the other good miner deserves some too. Rand makes no claim that luck does not play a role. Nor does she use a comparative approach like this -- comparing merit of one person with another -- as a basis to say what each "deserves". That's why the OP is addressing a straw-man.

Feelings don't have to lead to action, nor should they. To see this passage (or the one in the Rearden thread) as problematic you have to suppose that they do or should. We can experience feelings and acknowledge them and want to understand them (as Galt and Rearden do in these cases) without acting out.

Branden took this distinction up somewhere in his writings, saying that one of Freud's bad influences was the belief that we either act on feelings or repress them, when these aren't in fact our only alternatives.