Harrison Danneskjold

That's an interesting question, although I am having a bit of a hard time concretizing it. If they're active combatants on opposite sides then how many opportunities do they really have to converse? If they're not active combatants but just part-time sympathizers lending their support to opposite sides then they'd presumably be obliged to lie to each other about any intelligence they might come across. As I recall, the reasoning behind the notion that there's never any good reason to deceive a good man sort of hinged on said "goodness" necessitating rationality and that there are no conflicts of interests among rational men. Francisco D'Anconia had to do something similar to Dagny throughout Atlas Shrugged and I can't really call her a bad person; she's a heroine. Still, in one of Rand's journals she described the crux of Dagny's error as a tragic sort of overconfidence (understandable, since it is proper for her to be confident in her own ability, but nonetheless irrational when extended to all the people she depends on to keep the railroad functioning). And she explicitly says once or twice that she would kill "the destroyer" (John Galt) with her bare hands, if she ever found him - because of her irrational attitude towards the society she lives in. And after she returns from Galt's Gulch, knowing the truth but still refusing to join the strike, Francisco drops the playboy act to make it perfectly clear "it's you that I'm fighting".

Not if they legitimately won the vote, which is how that question was phrased in the debate. If I lost a race against Stalin himself because most Americans voted for him then I'd concede without any gimmicks or delays whatsoever. A president is not a monarch; he is not the ultimate political authority in our system; the people are. If the people vote against me then that's that; nothing else is relevant. Granted, if I was handing power over to Stalin I'd promptly flee the country - but as a private citizen. Now, all of this is assuming that the election was legitimate, and I haven't forgotten the questions that had been raised about it at that time. But such questions are (just like Trump's estimation of his opponent and absolutely everything else) totally irrelevant to the underlying principle here. A president does not have the right to contravene the will of the people, nor even to drag his feet about enacting that will. He is our servant; not the other way around. Trump did have the right to scrutinize that election and ensure its legitimacy. Having done that (and failing to really prove much of anything) he should've promptly stepped down. I actually do agree that Biden's gang is full of evil operators who're working against the interests of the American people. That's the choice we made, though. We can't flip the whole Monopoly board over just because this round went badly - which is precisely what Trump would've been doing if he hadn't conceded. And that's precisely it. The right wing cooks (such as the QAnon people) aren't the ones who're trying to shut down civilized conversations.

This happened to be my own personal theme song when I wrote those same musings. Either that or this. I'm not precisely sure.

Yes. Absolutely; yes. Which internal organs can I pawn off for it and how soon?

Sun Tzu, in the Art of War, spoke at great length about the importance of deception. To paraphrase, he said 'if you know your self and your enemy then you need not fear losing one battle, even if you fight a thousand. If you know your self but not your enemy then the battle is only half-won. If you know neither your self nor your enemy then your destruction is already assured.' Of all the lessons he taught in that book the importance of deception was by far the one he spoke the most about. The practical utility of this lesson is not lost on America's modern armed forces, for whom this book is required reading. The amount of time, effort and money we've spent on gathering accurate intelligence on our enemies while simultaneously feeding them falsehoods, in previous decades, is now a matter of public record (as is its efficacy). Ayn Rand made it clear that, while honesty is usually a virtue (under any normal circumstances) it ceases to be one when dealing with a certain type of person. In Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart finds herself telling lies easily at a certain point (when she knows that the truth would directly lead to the death of her soul mate) and this comparatively brief period of dishonesty culminates in her shooting a man at point-blank range. The parallels between this situation and that of a war are obvious. Last summer I was keeping a journal of my daily musings. Here is one excerpt: I don't have one specific question here. There seems to be some sort of ethical (perhaps even metaphysical) link between deception and warfare which I noted one year ago and haven't thought about since. I'd be interested in hearing any additional thoughts or insights you see.

On further reflection I'd like to apologize for attempting to pick that nit. Essentially since the most recent presidential debates I've been trying to draw a moral equivalence between the far right and the far left, because of how deeply horrific I found Trump's flat refusal to promise to concede if he truly lost. That was still horrific and I'm still not going to sing any of his praises whatsoever, but Trump is not the entire right wing; there's an important difference between even among his most insane devotees (and there are many of them I would personally term insane) and the far left wing of this country. The right wing still tolerates dissent and open discourse. Considering the answer I myself gave to the OP (that the Statue of Liberty should not shrug so long as open discourse is possible) I have been very wrongheaded to gloss over this difference. Donald Trump himself remains a bad person whom I do not like. But I shouldn't have tried to invent some way to disagree with your wholly uncontroversial post.

Not so long as we're able to argue for her long-overdue restoration. I cannot tell how far away that point is from the present (and I have been trying) but we're not there yet. When we get there I'll make sure to let you know where all the best spots are down by my river. Also, I don't think "dark lord of the Republican empire" is too much at all. Ayn Rand opposed Ronald Reagan (in her own words) because of his embrace of the religious right, which she thought would destroy anything which had been good about the Republicans before that. As a millennial it's not easy for me to picture what the Republicans were before Reagan but in my own lifetime the hardcore mysticism has been one of their main vices (and by far the thing I personally find most annoying about them). Trump seems to have actually countered that specific trend to some extent. He never pretended to be too religious, and in his wake that issue seems to be dying out among his sycophants. But I too am waiting for the other shoe to drop, in terms of what exactly replaces it. I agree with Yaron Brook that Trump may well have already destroyed any good there was in the right wing of this country. And I think your characterization is basically correct. My river is the Rum River, though. Its name currently doesn't align too well with reality, but maybe we can do something about that! Newcomers must bring their own supplies, of course.

To be perfectly clear (and all jokes aside) I don't hold QAnon to be much better than I'd guess that you do. When I first heard about it (via the main stream media) I was inclined to think it wasn't as bad as they were saying, as a simple matter of taking their biases into account. I still haven't forgotten all of the blatant lies they've tried to sell me so very recently. When I started seriously probing their ideas (via my landlord) I revised my estimation of QAnon to being roughly as looney as the MSM said they were, but doubtlessly nowhere near as dangerous. Having read some of what @Jon Letendre linked to here has not improved that opinion. I'm not sure if you're subtly trying to make sure that my most recent joke was, in fact, a joke. Many of your posts do tend to fly right over my head in precisely the way that this one has. But I do know who L Ron Hubbard was and I hope that any comparison was meant with just as much earnestness as that of my previous post. PS: If any comparison was even meant at all. IDK; your posts always gallop a ways away from whatever you were responding to, and sometimes I can also follow (and those times never fail to amuse) but sometimes not, and this is one of the latter ones.

I mean, if I was (hypothetically speaking) would I tell you?

Dirt on My Boots by Jon Pardi

You aren't aware of the Star Trek Q?!?!! Shame! Dishonor on you, dishonor on your cow; dishonor on your whole family! Go watch some more Star Trek: The Next Generation immediately! Thank you for stating that under absolutely no circumstances are your opinions open to revision; that simplifies things a whole lot. Some stellar Objectivist Epistemology huh? Indeed. From what I gathered from the linked website (you seem to have read far more of it than I, but still, I did read some) the posts are about as vague as you might expect from your local medium. The FoxHunt is on! Great; what is that and what precisely do you mean? We Can Not Be Stopped! Cool; who are you and what can you not be stopped from doing? I'm sensing a dead loved one whose name starts with a "G" over here! They're the sort of claims that can't easily be proven or disproven. Not a great epistemic look. This is gonna be an awkward question... Now that Joe Biden is officially our real president (as awful as he truly is) ... What do you now think of that prediction?

No!

You're not really trying to brag about the Jewish Space Laser lady now, are you? You - ... You do realize how insane the rest of her belief system is, don't you? I really don't think that's a member the Q movement should be bragging about. If she came out tomorrow and endorsed Ayn Rand I'd be mortified, because - well, Jewish Space Lasers. Unfortunately, in general I would tend to agree with that. One of the reasons I'm so frequently tone-policing my peers here (indeed, a large part of the reason why I'm reviving this old thread) is in the attempt, in my own small way, to combat that regrettable tendency. But when you are bragging about your own agreement with the Jewish Space Laser Lady I really can't avoid the conclusion that perhaps your own mind is a bit too open.