Harrison Danneskjold

Do I want Facebook, Twitter, etc., creating algorithms to filter what can be posted or redacted to my feed? Ultimately I want to be the one determining if said speech is truthful or not, not delegating it to a third party saying "trust us to filter it for you."

No, it was not, and I am not aware of any Q posts that should be described as "predictions," nor am I aware of any that suggested Trump would win.
It was my own overly wishful thinking prediction.
Q made posts leading up to the election that contemplated Biden's election, such as #4822 dated Oct 7 2020:

The analogy treats everyone who isn't vaccinated as if they actually have COVID at all times.  The better analogy would be should we ban all driving because some people who drive might drive drunk, and some of those people who drive drunk might harm others (although for most people we're not talking about death and dismemberment but a pretty unpleasant cold).

I don't disagree with you but I was hoping you could make  far stronger argument.
What is a sterilizing vaccine?
Why would coercion not be necessary if we accept a premise that they are increasing risk? Would it ever be necessary or justified?
Let's say the vaccine worked and it worked one hundred percent. I would argue that a person has right live their life as stupidly as they want as long as it does not harm others. The counter is made that they are in fact harming others. But why? Let us say the utopia is a covid free world, like a small pox free world. Do we have a right to force a utopia on another? Is there such a right? I would argue there is no such right. In fact, I would argue that we each have right to be unmolested by another's Utopian vision. Be it a green climate world, an Islamic republic, or a worker's paradise.
In this case there is a risk to taking the vaccine. Especially long term effects on reproduction. There is no justification to force parents to inoculate their children with such an experiment. Ultimately there is a risk that something may be discovered later on and all us who took that vaccine may regret. It is not impossible.
There is a right to quarantine that others have. But that is a right to quarantine a person who has an infectious disease. Not a right to quarantine a person who MIGHT have it.
Let us say there was NO vaccine. Then everyone MIGHT have it. Then we throw a dice to incarcerate some people? Or we find a scapegoat. The unvaxxed are now the new version of the sewer rats of the Nazi's. They're not people anymore. When don't we have a right to have concentration camps to quarantine them. All in the name of the common good.
Vaccine passports are the new Scarlet Letter.
To be clear, I am vaccinated. I am not making a case to serve me specifically. The principle is of liberty and one's rights is at stake here.

This argument implies the jabs are sterilizing vaccines.
If we are talking about Ebola and there were a sterilizing vaccine I doubt much ‘coersion’ would be necessary. 
With these vaccines and this contagion , vax passports aren’t a health measure , that premise is just an excuse for centralizing data and any and all power that would accrue to the ‘authorities’ that collected it.
Why would individuals need the power of government to protect themselves , if vaccines ‘worked’ ? Getting vaccinated would confer protection.
 If the vaccines don’t ‘work’ how does distinguishing ‘vax status’ among individuals provide any added protection above common sense and risk analysis?

re Q and body doubles, I'm not that well versed  but it seems the more 'outlandish' claims are generated by the qanon community or a segment there of, I know people who are convinced about the body double phenomenon. And have seen on the interwebs postings picking apart photos that the posters claim to show proof these doubles use make-up and prosthetics.

There is a very big difference between a vaccine that has a 20-year (or longer) track record of safety, and one that uses a never-before-used technique (mRNA) and was given to people -- and then mandated -- while it was still highly experimental. (They even had to change the definition of "vaccine" for it.) It is a mistake to package-deal these two things, but there is still a big insistence that you're either "pro-vaccine" or "anti-vaccine" and there is no room for being in favor of some vaccines but not others. (There's also a package-deal obscuring the notion that one can support vaccines but oppose mandates. Vaccines are science, but mandates are politics.)
It's also a mistake to say that people either agree with Q (and those invalid epistemological methods) or they don't. If Q says that 2+2=4, am I, as a rational person, obligated to deny it? If I don't deny that 2+2=4, am I then a Q supporter? (Of course it's a question of why 2+2=4, not merely that it is.)

De facto refers to things that you pretty much have to do but are not required by law. If most people think you should get a vaccine, and by and large people don't want to do things because of that like hire you for a job, let your kids attend the school, or letting you onto property. Social rather than legal enforcement. Or it could refer to things that unavoidably end up a certain way The drug war is legally enforced, so that's completely different.
You dropped the context of the discussion. We were talking about Q's alleged theories being correct. It's kind of like seeing someone post a picture of a Star of David, on a stack of money, that says "follow the money". And you could say that person is kind of right or onto something, because there are a lot of ethnically Jewish people involved in higher levels of media. But if we talk about this person being right, we are talking about the obvious anti-Semitic expression. Are they right that "the Jews" are up to something? If you agree a little bit, guess what, you are a little bit anti-Semitic. 
Maybe, but it could just as well be a propaganda operation led by the US government to subvert domestic authoritarian terrorists. "Unfriendly" in your statement is basically what side are you on. 

Here Musk Tweets with replies by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) / Twitter affirms that Twitter executives refused to address child exploitation occurring on the Twitter platform:

 
Here Musk affirms that Twitter executives knew that children were being trafficked utilizing the Twitter platform:

Elon Musk on Twitter: "@laralogan Indeed. Shame on them!" / Twitter
 

Imagine having ChatGPT create poetic quatrains predicting future events. It could provide a feeding frenzy for those who eat that kind of stuff up.
Here is an example of a ChatGPT output:
 

It would be more to the point to say that one should not lie to total strangers that one expects not to ever interact with again because there is no telling how far the lie and its effects will go.
(This is in addition to not lying simply because one should not do wrongful harm.)
 

Absolutely, it is to one's (self) benefit. Good people meaning people who can enhance your life, trade, recreation etc. What is the point of jeopardizing that? Being dishonest in that environment is a loss of opportunity.
But this does not hold true when you are amongst "bad" people. Identifying friend from foe is the key skill.

Harrison, a general good will towards people might be among the reasons for not wanting to put falsehoods in anyone's head unless you've specific good reason to do so. Therefore, one might form a habit to that effect, which does not require rethinking the whole issue every time someone asks you for information. 
Harrison, in the link from which I quoted in the first paragraph of the OP, I was indeed disputing the correctness of Rand's egoism in its beneficiary aspect. She recognized, in the intro to VOS, that this part of her ethical egoism required argument beyond her basic theory of value and her agent-egoism (the parts of her ethical theory I agree with).
I have stated many times that because ethical egoism is an essential part of Rand's philosophy Objectivism and I reject her full egoism package, I am not an Objectivist, notwithstanding all I agree with of it in many fundamental things. (If there's an essential of the philosophy you disagree with, you're not of that school; by the way, nothing conceived by Rand or her associates later that was not already in Galt's speech could possibly be an essential of the philosophy.) I have come around to a conjecture as to why so many readers, whether friends of Rand or opponents, cannot let it sink in that this writer and thinker (me) is a no-go on Rand's ethical egoism (which is the best one in the history of philosophy), and so I'm not an Objectivist in ethical theory. My conjecture is that people are so used to opponents of Rand distorting her views, which I do not. I think people who do those distortions have reached a tired stage of making dead their own minds. They don't really expect to be doing any new thinking or rethinking anything from seriously, accurately engaging with what Rand actually wrote.
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This fall I needed to return to working on (a final draft of) a scholarly paper on Kant for a publication. That is why I have not yet returned to what I promised for this thread nor the thread on sacrifice. In the interim, I came across more recent thoughts from the Aristotelian scholar Richard Kraut concerning ethical egoism, more recent than I had written about in the piece "A Rejection of Egoism."* So I'll try to convey his more recent and more elaborate thoughts on that also when I can come back to serious posting.

These can easily be remedied, although perhaps with the cost of relationship norms.  A refusal to "deal" in a transaction has the analogue of refusing to answer and also refusing to excessively reveal.  The trader principle does not say one MUST always trade (in fact one must not trade if it cannot be one's benefit) primarily it deals with how one trades and why.
 
Transactionally, "evasion" does not exist, but refusal does.  IF an otherwise innocent person asks you point blank for an answer you do not believe is appropriate for you to give, you do not pretend to transact (tell him something, evade and deceive) you refuse to transact.  "I'm sorry but that is private" or "I'm sorry but that is not my secret to tell" or "I'm sorry I do not trust you with that information"
Deception should be morally exercised to prevent someone from immorally gaining a value or causing harm etc.  it would be like fraud if perpetrated on an innocent.   You should deceive the confessed killer out to murder your wife, but not lie to your neighbor for no good reason.
As for revealing or transparency... this seems to be equivalent to your obtaining possession of something which really belongs to someone else.  Private information, ill-gotten secrets, something someone said...
there you can take the side of justice ... or you can choose to take the side of a person.  This is where integrity and courage come in... what is rational should almost always side with what is just.
And information which is simply not someone's business... well they have no business asking, nor you answering.

Good to see you again HD.
What happens when one looks at conversation as transactional?  That in a real sense when we offer statements as true we are offering in a market of interactions something potentially of value and in a real conversation, it is in exchange with other statements.
If a sort of trader principle applies… then wouldn’t offering up something worthless (a false statement) be kind of rotten?  I’m not talking about trading with criminals but innocent citizens.  Should not your offer and your exchange be genuine rather than fraudulent?  Now, it is in your rational self interest not to be rotten for the same reason you want to be a good trader in the world… but in the moment isn’t your immediate concern with the trade going well? 
I’m not sure but I might disagree with both of you.  
Not being rotten is both rationally in your self interest AND shows your concern includes others.  In fact your immediate concern for others can be self AND other interested when you are cooperatively building something.  building wealth or knowledge according to the trader principle seems pretty much win win.
We do not need another false dichotomy here.

I've always thought the virtue of honesty in this context was related to avoiding or preventing "evasion" which seemed to be at the root of evil. Was it to "not lie to others"?

Since the other links I posted do not appear to work:
 
On Moral Sanctions by Peter Schwartz
A Question of Sanction by David Kelley
Fact and Value by Leonard Peikoff

I haven't done much reading in this forum (I have a learning impairment), but I have an argument.
Capitalism cannot be inherently racist because Capitalism is not an individual person.
We might invoke the concept of structural racism, as being a disembodied phenomenon.
But in order to understand structural racism, we need to understand that every structure is constructed by individuals.
Structural racism is a legacy of the work and actions of individuals.
Capitalism is actually not conducive to racism, because the primary activities in Capitalism are production and circulation.
Production is not racist because commodities are made for everyone. Circulation is not racist because if you have money you can buy commodities.
If some companies will not hire racial and ethnic minorities, because they are racist, there will be others who do not discriminate.
If some stores will not sell to racial and ethnic minorities, there will be others who do.
If all companies and stores are discriminating, this does not mean capitalism is racist. It simply means that all current existing companies and stores discriminate.
Capitalism actually does a lot to destroy racism. It was the capitalist north that offered jobs to freed slaves who moved from the south to the north. It was the capitalist manufacturing sector which employed large numbers of black people in the fifties and sixties.
Capitalism is not inherently racist. People are racist.

There is so much which is conspicuously wrong with Fraser's address that it is almost a waste of text here to try to address the flaws we all can see and which Rand has specifically refuted throughout her work.

As for addressing "specifics advanced" in the paper... what stands out to me is actually what is NOT specifically advanced in the paper.
Although I feel a sense akin to the futility of disproving an arbitrary claim and the impossibility at pointing at traces left by that which does not exist, I realize that pointing out what should have been investigated, presented, and argued and was not, is possible and shall suffice.
 

First, I note that her approach does not critically distinguish between the system, capitalism, and the people participating in that system, nor the causal interrelationships therebetween.
If she were serious about determining whether "capitalism is racist", or necessarily so, wouldn't she be concerned with controlling variables... i.e. serious about determining whether the people themselves are racist and how can one tease apart racism on the part of the people and purported "racism" of the system or caused by the system?  In this vein, would a population of non-racists, in a non-racist culture, (let's say individuals of multiple races kidnapped from a perfect Marxist Utopia of Fraser's making), if "made" (or allowed) to run (or participate) in a capitalist system, become racist?  Or would the people remain devoid of any racism, and the system itself exhibit racism, quite independently of the lack of racism of any of its individuals?
Moreover, what constitutes "racism" BY a system?  Any system or organization or activity including people who are racist has "racism" occurring in proximity to it, but if one's concepts of "racism by people" and "racism by systems" are distinguishable according to any rational standard, such kinds of racism must not to be attributed to the system as such.  Whatever the system under investigation, some interaction between the racism of individuals and the system must be investigated in order to determine whether or not the system itself is "racist".  For example, does the system tend to decrease racism, increase it, or tends to leave it at the same level?  How does the system interact with the psychology of its participants such that it does give rise to this tendency?  But all this depends on a valid concept of race and racism.
 
Fraser's concept of "racism" is just as problematic than her concept of capitalism. 
Her implicit definition and characterization of racism is severely lacking and quite frankly IS racist.  She focuses on one particular form of racism, namely, white or European racism against people of color in the recent historical context caused in part by the slave trade in Africa.  Such a concrete is not racism as such but only an example of it.  A psychological remnant of exploitation (which slavery was) which survives in a uniquely historical culture and context, and exists.  To assume racism only takes that form, no matter where or when capitalism is instituted, is to attribute an intrinsic hierarchy of domination (implicitly, an intrinsic imbalance of capability, intellect, merit) of whites over blacks which is a highly racist idea.  If her thesis is about capitalism as such, and racism as such, it cannot be focused only on historical and geographical happenstance.  Accordingly, it would seem her ability to distinguish between concepts in the abstract versus concrete examples thereof is lacking.  Would the capitalism in Japan, for example,  refute or corroborate her theory about the relationship between race and capitalism?  Are whites in Japan extorted in the same way and for similar reasons blacks are in the US?  Are whites in Japan extorted at all?  What happens (or would happen) in African capitalist systems? Are whites extorted, how and why?  And once again is it the system which is racist or is it the people and what is the relationship? 
Is her so called racial extortion simply an echo of the technological extortion (conquest and slavery), causally linked and persistent in the minds of each population generations later merely because race is easily visible and distinguishes people as descendants of that technological extortion?  If so, then rather than tending to show any particular system is racist,  her ideas should lead her to the conclusion that the remnants of technological extortion and conquest persist psychologically in populations and arguably any system, where people can be identified as uniquely descendant from those groups, the conquered and the conquerors.  But such would require original investigation into psychology, tribalism, historical conquest, and how systems in general work, which do not necessarily fit well with her already determined outcome, and would take her far afield from her desired narrative.

Fraser makes no serious inquiry.  She makes no attempt to investigate the ideas of racism and capitalism and their actual causal interrelationships on a fundamental level.
She assumes her premises about exploitation and power, observes the historical accident of race correlating with technological advancement at around the time of the African slave trade (Europeans who happened to be white were more advanced technologically than those inhabiting Africa who happened to be black) in particular (while ignoring slavery crosses all racial boundaries and has existed for millennia and possibly since the dawn of man), and observes outcomes for certain populations compared with others as supporting her already held beleifs about capitalism (an incredibly new and never fully realized system), and asserts (essentially in a vacuum) moreover that capitalism is itself racist and implicitly magnifies and/or causes racism.
 
Perhaps Fraser's has unintentionally discovered that her implicit belief that white people or people of European descent (I single them out because she does) are or tend to be racist against people of color due to history, combined with her implicit knowledge that capitalism is the system which provides freedom (whether admits she knows it or not), leads, at first analysis, to the conclusion that the system does not serve to attenuate or directly stamp out that racism, but on the surface only leaves people to be free to commit the same errors.
In the grand scheme of things, even this is wrong, certainly for any actual capitalist who wants to succeed, and knows that doing so requires judging people on merit and not by skin color.  A laissez faire government does not stamp out gross errors of judgment, it allows  reality to do so and reality does so, even if only at a rate much slower than those who would rather force things to resolve themselves more quickly.  And as always, for those who see no problem with force, the relative timelines serve as a strong justification for its use. 
 
Finally, I must state I get the very strong sense that the paper is not, by any stretch, an impartial investigation into causal links or relationships between her concepts of "capitalism" and "racism", so much as it is a juxtaposition of language meant to fit or resemble a narrative, and ring true to her long ago ossified world view.  Such an approach and goal cannot abide serious, dare I say "critical", and open inquiry.  She decided on the "answers" before she set out to "find" them, and found the answers she wanted to find by "finding" the connections and congruencies she needed in various "sacred texts" of her ideology, not unlike how a prophet motivated to influence his village might "find" and reveal a prophecy of imminent disaster which had always been hidden in the old books of wisdom.
There really is nothing new to see here.  Nothing at all.
 

If you've never encountered this piece before, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Particularly the part about how the UK (and if you'll allow, by extension, capitalism) ended slavery.  Which is different from racism...though probably not from Fraser's perspective. 

Fraser gives three perspectives on capitalism: exchange, exploitation, expropriation. That implicitly sweeps production under a rug or reduces it to exploitation and/or expropriation. She says nothing about using reason, how markets form or change, the role of knowledge and information (such as described by F. Hayek), entrepreneurship, innovation, supply and demand, prices, goal setting, resources, and organization or management. All these are subsumed under exploitation or expropriation.
She remarks that using the exchange perspective, others could say that capitalism is indifferent to color, but she says this delinks capitalism from racism by definitional fiat. She similarly delinks production from capitalism by definitional fiat.
Fraser uses “power” a few times. The first four times are “labor power.” The rest are in the sense of the power to coerce or subjugate. None are really about the power to create. The term “labor power” was coined by Karl Marx and plays a large role in his view and critique of capitalism. It basically views laborers as “tools” for doing what’s demanded by capitalists.

"All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. . . . they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society."*
Speak for yourself, Professor. Did not apply to the millions of God-vested people all around him at the time of that writing. Does not apply to lots of atheistic, rational people I know today. Does not apply to me (and I'm not a subscriber to ethical egoism, SI, in case you'd care to avoid presumptuousness concerning audience at this site).
In this, Prof. Einstein was stuck-in-a-rut, without a shred of originality or profound insight into human nature.

"What about-ism" isn't a counterargument. It's a distraction. Communism and Maoism are more like Marxism+, that is, there are elements of Marxism. What would change about her argument if she mentioned them? She easily could condemn them on grounds of expropriation. An anticapitalist could say that every attack on Marxism should mention imperialism of the US, but you would rightly respond that the essay is about Marxism, not about the ways that capitalism has been corrupted in the US. The essay is about capitalism, so let's talk about capitalism. 
By the way, my basic response would be what 2046 wrote, but I felt some things were worth analyzing in more detail. 
First we need to consider exactly how she is defining capitalism.
"By definition, a system devoted to the limitless expansion and private appropriation of surplus value gives the owners of capital a deep-seated interest in confiscating labor and means of production from subject populations. Expropriation raises their profits by lowering costs of production in two ways: on the one hand, by supplying cheap inputs, such as energy and raw materials; on the other, by providing low-cost means of subsistence, such as food and textiles, which permit them to pay lower wages."
For us, we probably would usually respond by saying that capitalism requires individual rights. Expropriation is an explicit violation of individual rights, so what she is describing isn't actually capitalism. (Although low-cost means of subsistence sounds like a good thing to me, so even the description is a little weird, unless she is claiming something like exploited at poverty levels). Fraser seems to anticipate such a response from a capitalist. 
"The common thread here, once again, is political exposure: the incapacity to set limits and invoke protections."
She is saying that capitalism and rights are incompatible. As much as capitalists like us might want protection of rights, she would say that we will never get what we hope to achieve. But I think she fails to make this argument. She gives examples of expropriation, without making a clear-cut case why capitalism necessarily requires expropriation. 
Look at the definition before. It amounts to saying that it is advantageous for capitalists to expropriate people, especially with imperialism. But I'm not seeing why we must assume that a system of rights cannot exist that is rigidly enforced. Her argument might apply to anarcho capitalists, and that would make sense. Rand made arguments against anarchism on grounds that it would necessarily lead to rights violations. If Fraser were talking about capitalism without government, she'd probably be right. But when you throw in everything about exploitation, she is trying to talk about any kind of profit as denial of workers of what they earned. 
"Advantageous even in “normal” times, expropriation becomes especially appealing in periods of economic crisis, when it serves as a critical, if temporary, fix for restoring declining profitability. The same is true for political crises, which can sometimes be defused or averted by transferring value confiscated from populations that appear not to threaten capital to those that do—another distinction that often correlates with “race.” "
All she really has to go on is that expropriation is "appealing". This is about as strong as her case seems to be that capitalism *cannot* protect rights. For the most part, she goes over the ways that people can be expropriated:
"And it is largely states, too, that codify and enforce the status hierarchies that distinguish citizens from subjects, nationals from aliens, entitled workers from dependent scroungers. Constructing exploitable and expropriable subjects, while distinguishing the one from the other, state practices of political subjectivation supply an indispensable precondition for capital’s “self”-expansion."

"Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Marxism was an instrumental theory in African-based liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau. Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader of Guinea Bissau, linked class struggle to anti-imperialism, demonstrating the necessity of “incorporating the proletarian project into the project of national liberation” (Magubane 1983, p. 25). Also, antiapartheid ideologists in South Africa adopted aspects of Marxist dictum even as they emphasized national and racial identities (see Marx 1992).
Marxism continues to inform the spectrum of black progressive politics, even as Afro-Diasporic intellectuals argue for the autonomy of black liberation struggles and their “organic political perspectives” (James 1992, p. 183). Contemporary black intellectuals urge that a tripartite analysis, stemming from “the nexus of three crucial sites of struggles, community, class and gender, be at the center of Black liberatory projects” (Marable 1997, p. 8). If they adhere to this perspective, social justice movements constituted by black people can remain “avant-garde” formations of contiguous race and class struggles".
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And look at them - Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, etc. and missing, Zimbabwe - now.
It's those very "national liberation" and "Black liberatory projects" which hold and have held African citizens and their countries back - No more excuses and no one left blame, the colonists/colonials/"imperialists" have been gone for thirty to fifty years. South Africa has been 'free' for 25. Albeit that the Apartheid regime was proven by economists to have been de facto Socialist, apartheid is still irrevocably (and conveniently) equated with capitalism. Many of the original ANC cadres were trained in and had ties with Moscow back then, and I sometimes read the new wave of intellectuals spout the identical, worn-out doctrines, e.g. the LTV, above. Again, it is the neo-Marxism of the governing elites that did most of the damage, along with grand scale corruption in government.
For all its official, systemic racism, at the change over in '95, SA had the No.1 economy in Africa, little poverty and very high (Black) employment. From that height, just five months ago Moody's down-rated SA's status to "Junk", and a pre-lockdown unemployment number around 30% - clearly doubled at minimum, since.