tadmjones

No.
No.
No.
The theme of The Fountainhead is not political. Roark's dynamiting of Cortlandt is in the name of all creators and all real integrity. The fiction rolls on to its purpose and experience, details of law at the time brushed aside with little diligence or care by a writer's keeping focus of tuned readers on her concern in the fictional work, which is not law. In real cases, juries sift matters of fact and their fit or misfit with acts addressed in law. This jury in the Cortland case is deciding between an alternative of moral ideals. It is Man on trial. That is the significance of Wynand at the back of the courtroom. Such stuff, fictions and moved readers are made of. 

I have to point out this article (by Dr. Michael Hurd, who is now writing on Newsmax): https://www.newsmax.com/michaelhurd/price-controls-putin/2024/09/05/id/1179188/

If you want to cite Randian authority, the place to look is The Cashing-in: the Student 'Rebellion'. There she writes about the situations where one can properly break the law. One of these, she says (and tradition agrees), is to bring a test-case. He waited to be arrested. He never denied his part. He was willing to go to jail if the verdict didn't go his way. His case is more broadly symbolic than a challenge to a single law would have been, but it counts just the same.

I don’t agree, because you haven’t argued for your claim. It’s not obviously wrong, nor is it obviously right, so I reject the claim pending necessary support – therefore I disagree. [Fill in the argument as necessary]. I would agree that the refusal to comply with the court order is a wrongful act, I reject the position that such refusal retroactively changes the nature of the initial act, especially when this conclusion is derived automatically from the fact that the final court has rendered a particular judgment, and does not consider the court’s rationale for rendering that judgment. As we know from the substantial number of cases where SCOTUS has overruled itself, the notion of a “final” ruling itself has a dubious pedigree. The concept of “initiation of force” requires a firm objective definition and should not be operationally defines as “an event where an accused is found by a court to be at fault”. The act of a court ruling that a person is liable for an act does not convert that initial act into “initiation of force”, nor does refusal / failure to comply with a court-ordered remedy convert an accident into initiation of force.
I do understand the interest in converting all instances of legal enforcement into responses to “initiation of force”. In my opinion, the correct path of reasoning centers around the concept of “right”. If a person interferes (in a suitably-defined manner) in another’s right to his life, then in justice it is proper that he be required to compensate the other. In some situations, the interference is sufficiently evil and knowable in advance that we properly classify the act as initiation of force, analyzing the act as a crime deserving of punishment and not merely compensation. I recognize the desire to simplify the concept of “right” to “non-initiation of force”, but attempts to reduce all rights-violations to “initiation of force” renders the notion of initiation of force incomprehensible. Instead, we have rights, which can be infringed by evil means (therefore punished) or by innocent means (therefore compensated). Compensation for infringement of rights remains enforceable by the court, since the duty of the courts is to protect rights, not just punish for initiation of force.

So according to your complete misinterpretation of ethics, no rights could exist. Also, who would "own" one's own body/mind if not oneself and by what "right"? Your complete misinterpretation and misintegraration of valid reality based concepts and their implications leads directly to the false and evil ideas of egalitarianism and that one's own specific nature was "gifted" by "fairies" before one's own birth/existence.

Yes, individual rights applies to one's own life body and mind which in combination with Man's nature as a rational being is the source of rights. A person is just a potential before birth and does not possess rights yet let alone the right to possibly destroy an actual living being, the mother's, life. You clearly have not read Rand's statements on this subject or completely misintegrated it while doing so. And I'm not here to restate an entire argument she eloquently made along with countless New Intellectuals in many essays and other forms countless times in many ways. That is your own job to do and integrate in the same manner as it is not my job to teach you differential calculus in detail and properly integrate it using your own mind via reading and working through it rationally using your own mind after being pointed to the correct sources. This applies to every subject.

Not true, one's body and mind are automatically one's own property via nature and reality with zero mysticism or possible valid counter-argument and the source of all rights for rational beings to which they apply.

A quick search about French colonization of Vietnam has the French using the same humanitarian reasoning in that they needed to protect the population of 350k Catholics their missionaries had cultivated.
https://oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/87941/student-old/?task=1

I my opinion 'mainstreaming' of the disabled in public school settings was born more from budgetary concerns than any kind of pedagogic or empathetic concerns from administrators. In the case with my daughter we had to confront the disticts' 'placement' plans on numerous occasions, even among situations in 'special rooms'. In a few instances her 'peers' weren't handicapped enough as it were. Some of the children were ambulatory and prone to aggression and my daughter was incapable of escape or defense if she became a target, coupled with the budgetary concerns not allowing for a one on one caregiver situation , her personal safety was to be left to chance or luck, a placement the district was more than happy to make had we not intervened. The major fault lies in the structure of public education and mandatory attendance laws.

What makes life worth living is not living life. Life for its own sake is tedious, boring, dutiful, meaningless.
What makes life living is the concrete experiences one enjoys within it. The pleasures one derives from things. Satisfying one's desires. Pre-rational, visceral, gut-level enjoyment. Withouth rhyme or reason, you just like it. And then life has value as a means to those experiences. Life is not the end, it's a means to an end. Strikingly opposite to Objectivist thought.
In my direct experience that is the case.
All the Objectivist virtue and ethics couldn't make me happy or make me want to live. It's when I started listening to my own desires and pleasures, and enjoying things for their own intrinsic pleasure that life started to have value and happiness seemed possible.
When you're depressed, the only thing that matters is how you feel. That life is a value has no power to shake them from their depression, because it's not true for them. Life is only a value if your specific life is a value to you for other things.
Many Objectivists will shift gears and agree that's what they meant all along but they are doing a bait and switch with the meaning of the term life, and it contradicts the fine print of the ethics.

I'd rather vote for a Democrat who calls himself a Republican, than a Communist who calls herself a Democrat.

One of my many big complaints about Donald Trump and Republicans who follow his lead is that he is fundamentally no different than a Democrat.

For example, see "Harris and Trump Offer a Clear Contrast on the Economy" (but don't be fooled by the title) for a good summary of the candidates' superficially different, anti-freedom economic positions. The blurb put it much better: Both candidates embrace expansions of government power to steer economic outcomes -- but in vastly different areas.

Trump's similarity to the left emphatically includes being a thin-skinned, petulant, self-pitying whiner, as he has been ever since he lost in 2020, and now seems in danger of doing again this time around. Were I running against him, I'd label him the Orange Snowflake, and it would stick.
Yaron Brook contrasts how Trump ran in 2016 with how he's running now.
As I post, John Stossel's Election Betting Odds site rates Trump's and Harris's chances of winning at 46 and 52 percent, respectively on a razor-thin Electoral College margin. This is in large part because Trump, rather than allowing Harris to paint herself as the nutty radical that she is, is allowing himself to be flustered and bloviate about it, rather than making a case to persuadable voters or even simply zipping his lid.

Dan Hannon of the Washington Examiner says this far better than I, in "Instead of Sulking, Republicans Should Ditch Their Own Dud Candidate":Upon noting the misuse of the word coup, Hannon suggests that, rather than complain about the Democrats changing course, the Republicans ought to do the same, and offers the following worthy (if not compelling) rationale:Hannon all but says what I have thought even before Harris was nominated.

This election would be a golden opportunity for a decent, pro-liberty candidate, but the parties seem intent on betting that the other is so horrible, that its trash candidate can win, anyway.

My advice: Do what the Dems did, just this once -- and forevermore offer a real, pro-liberty alternative to the American voter.

-- CAVLink to Original

Keynes said "In the long run, we are all dead."
Sometimes people can use death (including from old age) to escape the consequences of their mistakes. It's the ultimate form of evasion. (This especially applies to politicians, who can lay the groundwork for guaranteed ruin -- in 50 to 100 years, long after the politician is dead.)
If people lived long enough to have to deal with the consequences of their mistakes, maybe they would be more careful.

One rarely encounters readers who wish that Rand's novels contained more speeches than they already do.

CBW – I and the philosophy I devised are also a legacy of Ayn Rand. That is here. Sample of academic paper of mine is here. And it is far more important than any idiotic mysticism such as Satanism. My philosophy does not have a distinctive political philosophy or esthetics ensconced in it. But it has a metaphysics with a theory of knowledge and an ethics, both extremely tight with the metaphysics. Political views are not the core of intelligent human being.
By late high school I was a Christian Socialist. In college with underground reading of Rand, she dissuaded me from that. Today, I'd label myself a libertarian Democrat (or vice versa). That is nothing of what is really important about me. By the way, there is now a book that is a very good complement and rounding out of Rand's collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. This book is Capitalism in America – A History (2018) by Greenspan and Wooldridge. Much blame for capitalism being here goes to Britain.
Rand was an amateur philosopher of the sort who addresses large traditional issues in philosophy. That is how she is described in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, and it is not meant for amateur to be derogatory, only that she was not an academic philosopher. After her mature philosophical novels, young people on their way to Ph.D.'s in Philosophy got acquainted with her (a couple of them became world-renowned Aristotle scholars), and they and the next generation of Ph.D.'s mentored by them wrote professional-level works in her philosophy, which continues. A Blackwell's Companion book A Companion to Ayn Rand has issued (2016). An auxilliary of the American Philosophical Association was formed called The Ayn Rand Society. Its professional members engage with other professional philosophers who are not Objectivists, and some books collecting many of those papers exchanging views have been published by the University of Pittsburg Press. (By the way, for all my overlap with Rand's philosophy, I am strictly speaking not an Objectivist because of disagreements on some essentials of that philosophy in ethics and epistemology. I respect Rand's thought even where I disagree with her.)
I'm pretty sure, CBW, that the biggest and most important legacies of Ayn Rand are quiet and personal. One: By end of first year of college, I had fallen into a bad psychological state, suicidal. I entered a private mental hospital to which I had brought my small Bible and a copy of The Fountainhead, which latter a cousin had given me on the preceding Christmas. The hospital urged I not bring in my Bible, as its mere appearance can trigger some into going berserker. My shrink encouraged me at my bed during those three weeks to continue and finish The Fountainhead. It saved my life. It illustrated that in spite of all the crummy things that had eventuated for me so far, I could and should strike out again for the territories of achievement. And I should love myself.

So, as I understand you a bit, you are looking at a summation of spaces in the two different configurations. This is getting to be a big detour off the point of the illustrations, which was only to illustrate a couple of plain cases in which one is picking up geometric formalities attending entities (one's hands) one is observing. But that is alright. When I post the next installment of the sweeping study "Necessity and Form in Truths", I'll head that post with the linked outline of the essay itself as I did upstream here.
The endpoint of all this, of course, is to enter the fray over the analytic-synthetic distinction as in Kant on up to the logical empiricists and to the treatment of that distinction as treated by Quine and by Peikoff, and as well to enter the fray over the right relationships between metaphysics, mathematics, and physics. In his essay the Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy, Peikoff treated the notion of contingency in the so-called synthetic truths of his era as merely hand-me-down from God-posing settings of so-called contingency from Medievals and from early moderns (such would be Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Berkeley). He then flicks away such contingency as primacy-of-consciousness error. Well, of course. But. The burning distinction in his and our own time is not between a lack of necessity (and intervening creative consciousness) in contingent truths and possession of necessity in analytic truths. No, the burning question had become what is the difference of necessity empirical truths and formal truths such as in mathematics or logic. Fortunately, for my study, in understanding more fully what led to Peikoff's take on truths of contingent, empirical facts, aI have not only what Peikoff wrote in that well-known essay, but what he wrote pertaining to the issue, in his Ph.D. dissertation and in his detail views on philosophers and issues in his lectures now transcribed in Founders of Western Philosophy – Thales to Hume.
We don't have to be coarse-grained about the difference or deny it. And we don't have to call the varieties of necessities by old names that really obscure what we are getting at now, today, in the context of our knowledge of the physical sciences, neuroscience, and mathematics. Also, I expect to criticize (and suitably replace) Quine's coarse-granularity in his booting and replacement of the analytic-synthetic distinction. Also, and sooner, diagnose the errors of Kant bearing on his distinction of the analytic-synthetic distinction, and replace the strong points he supports by his fantastical view of geometry and physics with a better supporting system.
But back to the illustrations of physical formalities (and, really, synthetic geometry as not gone on to analytic geometry) in such things as hands. For the hand flat on the countertop, we can also take note of a space by arc from the thumb to the little finger with no other fingers lying on the arc. Then we shall have noticed before us five fingers with five spaces between them. That fifth space is not such an obvious one as the four; some peoples use base 8 in their arithmetic computations rather than base 10 because counting of the four spaces between the five fingers is a salient thing to count.
So as to not fix on fingers of hands, but to indicate the more general phenomenon in spatial relations here in view, I'd like to mention that the same formalities of spatial situation can be seen in the lines of a musical staff. Cut out some staff to have a bit of staff on a chip of paper or simply draw the five parallel line segments on a chip of paper. Between the lines are four spaces. Taking into account the less obvious, we can notice the space from the top line to the bottom line, with no lines intervening in this space, if we consider the path from the top line going round back of the paper and then back on the front side up to the bottom line. And corresponding to fingers configured into a cylindrical arrangement, we roll the piece of paper with the five parallel lines into a cylinder (whose center-line is parallel the drawn lines) and find plainly a number of spaces equal the number of lines. (Let the formerly top and bottom lines be coincident in the rolled up paper, yielding 4 lines and 4 spaces or leave a space between the formerly top and bottom lines in the rolled up paper, yielding 5 lines and 5 spaces.)
The space in the pot is itself the same whether empty or occupied with water. The diameter of this portion of space is a certain physical quantity and is the same whether occupied with some water or not. The height of this space is the same whether occupied with some water or not. If the pot is two-thirds full of water, the height of the space is the sum of the height of the water level and the height of the space from the surface of the water to the top of the pot, which in sum is the height of the interior of the pot. Water from the tap is passing through other portions of space and coming to rest in the space of the pot. (And just say No to supplanting physics with metaphysics. That would be a regression and a spoilage in human knowledge.)
Taking a larger picture of what is going on in my concept of formalities that belong to concretes and which are the fundamental contrast class of a concrete (just as potentials belong to actuals and are the fundamental contrast class of actuals): The form thing in my ontology is a constituent in existence whether or not a mind is discerning it. But this form is not a return to Aristotle's form-matter metaphysical pair. Then too, form as belonging to concretes in my ontology is nothing coming into the world only by mind, as Kant had it, nor compatible with Leibniz's view that all relationships are mental. I have been able to muster illustrations of form in my special sense. My sense of form at work is at odds with the usual idea (which was Rand's also) of taking the fundamental contrast class of the concrete to be the abstract. I took a new turn with form in my system, and the ramifications are in the exciting remaining development I'm presently and the next few years giving this philosophy which is closely related to Rand's.*
 

Yeah because the Democrat nihilists who control the press are never trolling, and neither are the "Objectivist" bloggers who act as a transmission belt for them and are then automatically reposted here.

Well, no, he was underling in charge or involved with monitoring nuclear 'waste disposal' or some such , but he was a luggage thief,lol, got caught because he wore a victim's one of a kind designs on television , lol!
The one on the left is in charge of a rather large swarth of medical services overseen by the federal govt, he got the job after removing his mother from a long term care facility in PA just prior to ordering covid patients to be housed in long term care facilities in PA.

But Tad, threat to our democracy wasn’t working and this line of attack is brilliant! Have you scanned the headlines lately? Even the experts say it’s working!!

Vance is weird , Harris is popular

Over the weekend, I twice ran into the Harris campaign's attempt to label Republicans weird, and I wasn't particularly looking for it.

Scanning headlines, I found a Salon piece titled "'Pointing and Laughing:' Democrats Leaned in on 'Weird' and Experts Say It's Working."

Around the same time, a glance at a social media feed showed me J.D. Vance trying to fight back:There is no need to rehash Vance's insulting characterization of a large swath of the voting population or his anti-abortion rhetoric to know why some might find Vance at least as weird as the people Vance is tweeting about.

I'm not a fan of either side, but I do. I replied in part:Setting aside my assessment of the puzzling obsession with sex-related matters evident on both the far left and the alt-right, I have to hand it to the Democrats: This line of attack is brilliant.

Why?

First, there is an easily-grasped element of truth to it. Anti-abortionists qualify as weird on at least two levels: First, they're out of step with about two thirds of Americans. Second, they have no rational grounds for their religious-based fears that, somehow, not treating women as breeding animals is going to bring ruin and destruction down on our great Republic.

To be fair, noting this does not in any way mean that the left has anything close to a solid case for its cause du jour of performing ... rather invasive and possibly irreversible ... medical procedures on minors in the name of treating some newly-minted and hardly indisputable psychological condition diagnosis currently popular in places like California.

But this does lead to the second point: Putting all the attention on the alt-right's weirdness certainly puts the public to sleep regarding the far left's own even as it alerts the public to the issue.

Vance knows this, as his reply shows, but guess how much good it will do past his base? I'm thinking approximately none.

Worse for that camp, it shows that they are on the defensive.

Worse still for the GOP, the Democrats are making them the butts of jokes -- which is part of what Trump had been doing to them:Trump's opponents are having FUN. Let that sink in for a moment.

The rest of the article is also worth reading, and I think it is indirectly on point regarding something I have complained about a lot in this campaign, namely the fact that neither side can be bothered to try to make a positive case to non-partisans:Normie, once-usually-Republican voter here: The GOP is out of touch and people are laughing at it.

This is not the sort of appeal to values I was hoping to see, but absent one, I expect it to work, all things being equal.

-- CAVLink to Original

Do we want Trump to be a "strong" President or a "weak" President?
Joe Biden has been a weak President, and the result has not by any means been a less tyrannical government. The rest of the government simply steps into the power vacuum.
There's an equivocation here between the people in the Beltway and the people of America. The people in the Beltway want "freedom," they want to be "free" to regulate however they wish. This is not the same thing as the American people being free.
So what we want is a President who is strong against the bureaucracy but not one who makes the government strong against the people. There is a difference.

Actually, the assertion that "the election was fair" is the one that isn't backed by any evidence, and what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Trump has taken very anti-freedom stands on abortion and immigration, although he has toned down the former.  Even where he supports freedom, he hasn't been very effective.
With his stolen election lie and his policy of winning at all costs, he threatens to destroy our system of democratic elections and orderly transfers of power.  If he does destroy it, we will be left with a contest of physical force to determine who gets power, which will result in dictatorship of one sort or another.  This is an imminent danger.
The Democrats' ignorant path to dictatorship will take much longer to get there, so our best bet is to stop Trump, continue teaching fundamental principles, and do what we can to slow down the slide into more and more statism.
 

https://drhurd.com/2024/07/18/there-is-no-free-trade-without-free-countries/