tadmjones

When you say "it" are you referring to materialism? If so, yes, materialism today about living things would be the discreteness of cells. But that is not a conjecture or implication of any modern philosophical position; it is just the result of nineteeth century biology that all living matter is made of cells. It is a further speculation, such as I would make, that all consciousness and experience and memories are results in living matter engaged with the world and the organism's own internal regulations. That would be a modern materialism of consciousness and pals. That the matter is cellular is only from science.
In the portion of what I said that you quoted, I was thinking only of general ontology and Rand's point about it in that first paragraph at the top of page 39 in ITOE, with which I mainly agree. I don't see that as implying an ontologic discreteness, rather, an absence of any absolute disconnection of any existent from any other existents at all (except the existent that is the entirety of existence, of course). And I don't see that position in general ontology as implying any sort of materialism.
 

Here's a good article from John Eastman, who represented Trump before the Supreme Court concerning the 2020 election, about some of the information he was given in the course of doing his job:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/most-secure-election-american-history-john-eastman
Interesting read!

Yes as to the level of indigenous adherents, but Shankarya widely associated with Advaita is a cultural touchstone because of his purported( various historical disputes with crediting) realignment of Vedic traditions in the sense of establishing Indian nationhood. Vikekananda called on that history in his advocacy of ending the British mandate.
Kind of like in the US everybody 'knows' George Washington, but they aren't all or even many freemasons, lol.
But also I think you are right in the that the philosophy is more known among seekers, just my fanboy buttons getting pushed, lol

Advaita Vedanta starts with experience, awareness as primary and subjective. It says all experience involves a subject that is aware of an object and that finding the locus of the awareness is the finding of, or the realization of the self, the witness consciousness.
The analytic meditation technique they employ is called "neti, neti", when translated from Sanskrit it mostly means "not this, not that". To 'see' the locus of the consciousness you identify all of the subject/ object relationships in an 'act' of experience to discern the 'ultimate' subject/subjectivity.
An example would be to sit in front of a vase with a flower in it and analyze the experience of seeing the bloom. Right away it is obvious that the flower is not you it is an object of your awareness. You notice you are using your eyes to see the flower but that the 'seeing' isn't 'in the eyes'. You then notice the eyes 'convey' the visual image to the mind/brain for contemplation, discrimination and identification of the object. And then you notice that the experience of the knowing that you see the flower is the awareness of the object or product of the brain/mind. You can also notice that the awareness that 'sees' the flower, and all 'seen' things, is a static ever present locus. It was the same awareness prior to that particular experience of the flower and continues to be that locus, irrespective of the changing conditions and functioning of the eyes and mind.
In Advaita Vedanta Consciousness is: not the body, not the mind, not an object, not many and not two. Non dual.
 

Ooops! Resonant, not Radiant. Maybe praise from MP was close in my head.
Or maybe it was some sort of Freudian slip (when you say one thing, but mean your mother).

G.K. Chesterton is mostly right.
'I stated  later that objectivism [sic] posits goals “that are not even desirable: commitment to the maintenance of a full intellectual focus, to the constant expansion of one’s understanding and knowledge, and to never permitting oneself contradictions. If any individual were truly as devoted to these goals as the objectivists [sic] urge him to be, he would be compulsively rational­­ and therefore inhuman and irrational.' -Albert Ellis, Is Objectivism a Religion?

"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.

"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?

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.
 

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'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"?

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.

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

While I would agree with the principle of avoiding theocracy, religious schools should not be disallowed in law. The solution is to do away with government supported schools.
But Christianity is very foundational to Louisiana, Catholicism in particular as in their 'counties' are 'parishes'.

The Bulwark is rubbish if this is indicative of their views!

Everybody gets the blues once in a while. A few moments from Ayn Rand's life, as recounted by Nathaniel Branden in Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand (1989):
By the fall of 1958, it was apparent that Ayn was sinking into a deep and tenacious depression. Not the sales of her novel or the torrent of fan mail or any of the interesting people we were meeting seemed to cheer her for more than a few hours or evoke in her any desire to write again. The thought of another project—any other project—exhausted her. Every day, she sat long hours at her desk playing solitaire, the game becoming a metaphor for her sense of her position in the world. She did not read. She left her correspondence largely unanswered. Her body ached with numerous tension pains. She had written a novel about a man who stops the motor of the world; now it was as if her motor had stopped. She saw herself as trapped in a swamp of mediocrity, malice, and cowardice. She had found admirers but no champions. . . I thought she was experiencing a delayed letdown after thirteen years of high emotional intensity while writing Atlas full-time. Ordinary living could hardly compete. In many of our discussions, from the summer of 1958 and for the next two years, she would begin to cry while describing her perception of the world and her own place in it, and she confided that she cried almost every day. This struck me as shockingly out of character, and I realized that I had underestimated the depth of Ayn’s struggle, with which I felt enormous and painful empathy.
We had long conversations on the telephone every day. I visited her two or three evenings a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with Barbara, so we could discuss how we might better interpret the events that were such blows to Ayn’s ambition, energy, and enthusiasm. These sessions typically lasted until five or six in the morning. Her suffering was devastating to watch. [...]
Ayn’s depression persisted relentlessly. “I’m ashamed of myself for crying so much,” Ayn said one evening. “The Collective would be shocked if they knew. You don’t tell them, do you?” I told her I did not. “Galt would handle all this differently. Somehow, he would be more untouched by it. More realistic. But I don’t know how or in what way. I would hate for him to see me like this. I would feel unworthy, as if I had let him down.” I was used to hearing her discuss Galt as if he were a real person; all of us did that. I said, “I look at it differently. If I were knocked down and hurt badly by something that had happened to me, so that I was crying a lot or devastated or whatever, I think I would say, ‘All right, look at me. I’m in a bad way. So what? In a little while, I’ll pick myself up again. Meanwhile, this is reality. Why pretend it isn’t?’ ” She chuckled unhappily. “You’re quoting my own philosophy back to me. Only, for once, I can’t seem to apply it.” (ch. 11)
Her view of depression, if accurately told, was interesting:
When I tried to tell her of some new research that suggested that certain kinds of depression had a biological basis, she answered angrily, “I can tell you what causes depression. I can tell you about rational depression, and I can tell you about irrational depression. The second is mostly self-pity, and in neither case does biology enter into it.” I asked her how she could make a scientific statement with such certainty, given that she had never studied the field. She shrugged bitterly and snapped, “Because I know how to think.” (ch. 15)
I suppose she would have scoffed at Schopenhauer's claim:

"Myth No. 4: Trade and open markets create "a race to the bottom."
That's how Jon Stewart decries globalization on his show, saying, "Globalization allowed corporations to scour the planet for the cheapest labor and loosest regulations!"
----
That problem child, "globalization", would be fine and dandy when governments are barred from entry, economy and state kept strictly apart . Individuals (and companies) deal and trade with others, wherever and whenever they see opportunities and at their own risk. As it is, the large corporates operate "hand-in-glove" with their Gvt which in turn makes deals with foreign gvts. That is then, corporate-globalization, backed, and given entree by, the power of states.
Corporatocracy plus statism.
(which gives spurious credibilty to socialists who claim capitalism = imperialism ("/neocolonialism")
As good a place for this essay by Jeffrey Tucker
https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-american-capitalism-mutate-into-american-corporatism/
 

I suppose the article does an adequate job of addressing the standard political complaints about jobs in relation to imports (though I don’t accept the claim that “Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined” on the simple grounds that this is a factual claim which deserves actual numbers and sources rather than an unsupported assertion – but facts apparently get in the way of reasoning). One issue which does indeed figure into Objectivist reasoning on this topic is the question, what is the proper response to initiation of force?
Governmental force can be justified as a response to the initiation of force, therefore if the government of China initiates force against its citizens to compel labor or to subsidize manufacturing (etc.), it is not immoral for the US to retaliate by restricting the aggressors from profiting from their violations of rights. We have no duty to retaliate when the force is not directed against us, but it is morally allowed.
Not all international trade is voluntary, a proper analysis of the issue has to include whether or not some nation operates on free market principles, or does it use slave labor and government subsidy to allow their goods to better compete against goods traded under free market principles? Of course, there are no nations operating under free market principles – our goods are at a disadvantage because of price inflation resulting from government regulation including minimum wage laws. Our own government puts American goods at a disadvantage because it initiates force in order to create a supposed social benefit.
Even though all goods are tainted with the stain of force, we cannot therefore forbid all trade (hopefully this is not a controversial proposition). On the opposite side of the continuum, is it ever proper to limit trade in goods created by initiation of force? A kind of case that should be obvious is that it is proper to restrict trafficking in stolen goods, e.g. I cannot break into a warehouse, take goods, then sell them at a discount. But what about the case where the vendor did not himself steal the goods, instead, the government confiscated the goods and gave them to a vendor, who then sold them at a discount?
At the level of theory, all we can say is that initiation of force is improper. At the level of practical law, it is far from clear what degree of initiation of force can be ignored, when it comes to the governments (proper) function of protecting rights. A simple principle that could be applied is that it is proper for the US government to protect the rights of US citizens, and only US citizens. I am referring to the sketchy realm of the morally optional, when it comes to government action.

Boydstun, I think in the spirit of your personally being “not purely egoist”, you might consider it important to sketch, if only in broad strokes, the bones or main structure of your ethics (which you deem are on a solid footing) in a sort of “introduction” which you might be able to expand upon if the finitude of life’s span permits, but which nonetheless represents the unwavering unshakeable base you have already formed, and upon which any remaining  more detailed formulations and expositions are to be made.  I propose a sort of ITBE (Introduction to Boystun’s Ethics) even if only in essay form, but possibly of any length or of any title, again in the spirit of how crucial the philosophy of ethics is and your being “not purely egoist”.  

Calling "sanction" occasions of failing to recognize evil and take actions to oppose it is incorrect English, a smearing out of the term sanction.

Ayn Rand's noble romanticism, as she says in her Introduction to The Fountainhead, reclaims the emotions of reverence for the sacred back from traditional theistic religions' monopoly on them. Is this Objectivist romance for real ideals what attracts some Christians/theists to Ayn Rand's work, despite their Christianity/theism?
Christianity's "transcendent reality" is God, and human earthly affairs are mundane. Galt's triumphs are "transcendent" in that they are heroic realizations of his highest ideals, the exalted becoming of his rational productive being. To be inspired by this noble, uplifting romance of Galt, is to "breathe in" and be energized by that "spirit".

I think the essential in most religions could be characterized as a faith in a transcendental aspect of reality. A faith in the possibility of overcoming the seeming paradoxes in the gross physical environment of life on earth. 
The life and death of Christ, the perceptual aspects of a human being and the strive to offer an explanation or meaning for how non material aspects , ie 'love' or 'will' , can or do affect one's 'lived experience'. Why be 'good', what are the results of 'being good' , whence the good ?