JMeganSnow

You're making a lot of really bad underlying assumptions here. Let's look at a few of them: The "tragedy of the commons" will happen if people aren't FORCED into doing what's "good for them" (i.e. pay taxes for the support of the state). This is an absurd claim because people regularly *do* all sorts of abstract things that benefit them (buy insurance, save for retirement, preventive maintenance) only long-term. It's been my experience that you only get a "tragedy of the commons" situation in real life when the default has been mismanaged. (Read Nudge.) A buzz-phrase out of the "liberal narrative" is not proof of any position. If you have some actual data to support your case (such as a researched discussion of the early days of the Articles of Confederation and/or the failure of other voluntary financing schemes), that might be different. This whole "demographic" thing. Objectivism completely and utterly rejects the idea of treating individuals as though they belong to a "demographic", which quite frankly would be insulting to any rational person. Before multiculturalism and this whole demographics fetish, America used to use the "melting pot" strategy where, due to uniform legal rights people gradually assimilated into the culture and the only "demographic" left was "Americans". Now, with enforced "you must respect their culture and their native folk ways no matter how insanely stupid and oppressive and even evil they are" multiculturalism, assimilation doesn't happen. My family is all descended from immigrants, and WE don't form any sort of independent "demographic". We assimilated. It's multiculturalism that needs to go, not open immigration. You're not going to understand individualism if you take certain collectivist positions as the given and work from there.

Usually when people say that Objectivism is consistent with what they already thought, what they mean is that they had a lot of unarticulate conclusions and "rules-of-thumb" based on their lifelong experiences and Objectivism gave them a clue as to how to make those ideas consistent. A lot of these same people will later on come across MORE of Ayn Rand's writings where she talks about, say, abortion or her views on femininity and freak out because they don't really "get" how she arrived at her conclusions and the fact that they don't agree with her makes them think that the whole system is somehow flawed. So, if you're learning Objectivism, the #1 absolute best thing for you to do is to focus on HOW Ayn Rand arrived at her conclusions, not WHAT those specific conclusions were. If you understand the HOW, you'll not only become consistent (and also, likely an Objectivist), but you'll understand the difference between core and ancillary issues and either agree or disagree with Ayn Rand for a reason. For instance, I disagree with Ayn Rand's conclusion that being President would be psychological torture for a rational woman because I disagree with her conclusion that the President is the "superior" (in a hierarchical sense) to everyone--because, among other reasons, this ignores the fact that all hierarchies exist in a context. In a certain context, yes, the CoC would be the hierarchical superior of everyone in the office--but in another context, every citizen in the country is the hierarchical superior of the president because they select that person by voting and can withdraw their support at any time. No one is the boss of everything. I digress, but you can see the shape of the thought process going on there. I examined why she reached a given ancillary conclusion, decided that the facts as I know them didn't add up, and so I disagree. If I disagreed about something fundamental, I wouldn't call myself an Objectivist.

I am a raspberry truffle. Wow, this is fun. Let's all make arbitrary claims!

Eh, I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, and it sounds more like a "have faith" movie than an "act rationally!" one. I won't give spoilers (go read the synopsis yourself if you want them), but I find art with this doomed hero esthetic to be depressing, not inspiring. Mindlessly carrying out the motions of a quest that leads nowhere is not heroism, it's fanaticism. If the ending were different I might consider it, despite the rancid subject matter, but treating education like some sort of holy grail or magic talisman is not a message I really want to subscribe to.

How is it romantic to be suddenly and inexplicably seized by some irrational, uncontrollable passion that you cannot analyze or control? That sounds hellish--like a cat suddenly coming into heat. If that's how you define "romance", then no, Objectivism has absolutely no connection with it whatsoever. Objectivist romance is a chosen, developed passion for something or someone which meets your highest standards and grants you the greatest joys. Is there something irrational or inexplicable about loving someone who embodies everything you believe makes life good and who chooses to share their precious time with you? You REALLY can't comprehend ANY source for that behavior or come up with ANY explanation for it? Objectivists embrace precisely this sort of passion as the best thing in life--passion for ones work, one's romantic partner, one's friends, one's home, each to the degree of importance to your life and happiness. Objectivists are dedicated valuers who bring this zest even to such tiny activities as trimming a rose bush for esthetic appeal or selecting fruit at the store because even those small things add to life. Ultimately, Objectivism IS the philosophy of romance. (Not for nothing did Ayn Rand title her book on esthetics "The Romantic Manifesto".)

According to that wiki page you linked to, Prathyekha buddhas are not "selfish", they are simply self-taught and thus unlikely to be able to teach others the full dharma. They are certainly not selfish in the Objectivist sense, which has nothing to do with being alone or avoiding people (Objectivists come in all flavors of introvert and extravert) but has to do with the beneficiary and motivator of your actions. Because it is focused around personal enlightenment, Buddhism does contain SOME aspects that people might consider "selfish"--except that in order to attain personal enlightenment, you have to blank out the self. There's even a great line in The Fountainhead about this concept, when Ellsworth Toohey is talking to his niece Catherine and telling her that only when she has completely expunged her "self", will she be fit to enter heaven, and she asks (paraphrase), "but when the gates of heaven open, who is it that is going to enter?" How can anything be valuable to you, if YOU don't exist any more? This is why Buddhism is not *actually* a selfish philosophy even though it is focused around "personal" goals. Materialistic (as opposed to mystical) altruism is actually more consistent philosophically than ideologies like Buddhism or Christianity that offer some sort of bribe (enlightenment, salvation) as a "return" for intentionally bringing about the destruction of your mind and life. Ultimately, consistent materialistic altruism (such as that espoused by Kant) offers no reward, not even paradise, only categorical imperatives. As you do more reading, you will learn that Objectivism does not deny the existence of "intuition" or "creativity"--Objectivists just know that these aren't mystical and inexplicable "irrational" processes. Their operation can be understood, controlled, and improved. They're just not processes that you have immediate, direct, conscious control over, any more than an athlete has immediate, direct, conscious control over every individual muscle fiber in his body. He improves his athletic performance by dealing with the whole system of his body, not individual fibers, and you must train your subconscious in the same way.

I love how the people who are claiming that life is "intrinsically" good in this thread are using the term "value" INTERCHANGEABLY as a noun and a verb and ascribing AUTOMATIC VOLUNTARY ACTION (i.e. the VERB) to someone on the basis that they have someTHING which OTHER PEOPLE WOULD CONSIDER A VALUE, THE NOUN. This entire thread is nothing but a tremendous rationalistic pile. Think for just a second what it would actually mean if it were true that people automatically "value" (the verb) life *because* they are alive. Well, for one thing, it'd mean that there are no irrational values--that ANY action you take MUST be directed at sustaining/promoting your life BECAUSE you "value" said life without any choice about the matter. This is obviously bunk. People can and do act to gain and keep irrational things that do not sustain OR promote their lives. Learn the difference between nouns and verbs. It also may help you to understand that there is a sort of hierarchy of action involved here. To humans, what matters is not the automatic functions of body but the volitional functions of mind. Your body may keep struggling to live against your choice, but this is not the same thing as valuing life in the human sense, or even in the animal sense. This is "value" in the sense that a vegetable "values" it's life. Ayn Rand felt the need to differentiate this sort of automatic functioning from value-seeking behavior, and referred to it in her writings as "goal-directed" behavior, which she took to be a broader term than true value-seeking behavior. Some people aren't even capable of this true "goal-directed" behavior because their bodies are messed up in some way and they must volitionally intercede with their "automatic" mechanisms in order to stay alive.

It's silly even to say that life can be intrinsically valuable. The very fact that people choose to commit suicide and sometimes do so for very good reasons (they are in intolerable pain, for instance) means that life, their life, is no longer of any value to them--it is a heavy weight that they no longer feel strong enough to carry. So, no, life is not "intrinsically" valuable. It is the standard of value and necessary for the formulation of ethics--meaning that a proper ethics is structured to sustain life. Suicides don't need or want ethics, they have stepped outside of the need for a guide to living and seek only an exit.

Corruption in government (as with any other crime) is largely driven by profit-loss calculation on the part of the would-be corrupt individuals. In situations where risk is low ("everyone does it!") you're going to have corruption even at low reward levels. So the proper method for dealing with corruption is for the organization to dramatically increase the risks involved. However, I'm not sure I agree with your conception that gov't in Mexico is *particularly* corrupt. It might be more *venal*, but I doubt it's much worse overall than here in the U.S. where our PRESIDENT just finished ramming through a bill that most of the citizens don't want and a large portion are adamantly against. It might be better if it WERE possible just to get together a big chunk of cash and buy the man off. So don't think that just because that "corruption" statistic measures *venal* corruption that it is tracking *all* government corruption. The ultimate solution to government corruption is twofold: take away as much as possible of the gov'ts power to dispense economic favors, and have a system of "checks and balances" that make the venal type of corruption more risky. Wouldn't it be helpful, for instance, if the courts recognized that the forensics people were predisposed to be biased and instead of treating them like a neutral third party, allowed the prosecution and the defense to bring in their own "experts" and dicker it out in the courtroom? Treating gov't officials as though their testimony is always suspect would be a step in the right direction there. It's less efficient, but EFFICIENT gov't is not necessarily desirable--because one of the things gov't does so easily is violate individual rights, and nobody wants them to be more efficient at that.

There's still a chance to do battle with this bill in the supreme court--some states, like Idaho, have ALREADY taken legislative action that prevents their citizens from being forced to buy health insurance. This action guarantees that this matter is far from settled. The focus of the battle has shifted and we should all move to keep up with it so our efforts are not lost.

Both. You cannot form a concept of causalty without first having a concept (if only an implicit one) of identity--causality is a corrolary of the axiom of identity. But the route by which you, as a person, determine that things are what they are and contradictions cannot exist is an inductive one that begins with the first moment you open your eyes after birth. When you begin making observations of objects, you will eventually come to the (implicit, usually) realization that they are what they are and do what they do regardless of what you would prefer or any other mystical or imaginary force that could somehow interrupt this situation. But organizing this implicit knowledge into explicit, logically-stated laws of metaphysics is rather a complex task. The fact that we lack sufficient knowledge to predict something perfectly (or the means to obtain that knowledge, which is supposedly the case in terms of whatever existed prior to the big bang or inside the nucleus of atoms) does NOT mean that it is exempt from the law of causalty or identity. You are making one of the main mistakes of the Primacy of Consciousness view where perception and knowledge somehow determine reality. "I don't know how to predict the outcome" is NOT THE SAME THING as saying "the outcome is totally random and divorced from causalty". Dr. Peikoff even discusses this in OPAR to some extent when he talks about volition, saying approx. that "the opposite of determinism is not random chance, but causality" or some such. A man's behavior is neither random nor determined--it is often very easy to predict a man's choice in advance if you know the man. Volition is a matter of a different type of causality (chosen) rather than the mechanicially determined billiard-ball sort of causality that physicists study. How it operates, I have no clue, but I can observe that it operates just as I can observe the billiard-ball type of causality in operation even though I don't have much of a clue about that, either.

I'm having an issue with the Rich Text Editor in the new version of Firefox where my cursor does not appear in the typing window and I'm unable to move it using the mouse or arrow keys, only by backspace or by typing. Needless to say, this makes editing a PITA. Even the delete key is not working. IE 8 is not having this problem.

I'm not seeing what this is intended to accomplish. You're also conflating "new to Objectivism" with "new to this Forum", which may or may not necessarily apply. It's more than a little pretentious to start throwing around broad generalities about forum users like this, especially when you proceed to start throwing around Ayn Rand quotes without context or stated goal. It smacks of appointing oneself the Missionary to the Unenlightened or similar bosh.

First read Harry Potter, then Eragon, then Glory Road (Heinlein) then The Anubis Gates (Powers) then The Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny, then anything by A. Lee Martinez and/or Laurell K. Hamilton. And then you'll understand why people who read fantasy can spend hours browsing just three racks of books--because most of it is so radically different that it can be really tough to predict whether you're going to like something or not. Oh, there are some fantasy staples that get revisited a lot, but it's certainly a lot wider than, say, WESTERNS.

Yes--Dr. Peikoff talks a little about this in one of his recent podcasts on the concept of Total War. I don't see Kolker as necessarily vile or despicable in his recommendation here, just that he's excessively gloomy and it's encouraging him to spout some irrational conclusions. Total genocide has never been necessary to remove the military threat even of horrifically repugnant ideologies. If this were true, you'd expect there to have been more and deadlier terrorist attacks against the U.S. since the war began, and continually escalating, especially during the "surge". This has not been the case. What is the case is that almost all of the accurate information about the war (and the success of the surge) has been completely filtered out and replaced with words like "quagmire" and "unwinnable". (Read Thomas Sowell's remarks about the Tet offensive in the Vietnam war for more on this same issue in his book Intellectuals and Society). War is not about exterminating possible threats or dealing out some kind of "reciprocal" smack. It is about protecting the lives and property of the citizens of your country, INCLUDING your soldiers, from ACTUAL military threats. Anyone conversant with Objectivist philosophy, particularly the epistemology, should be well aware that there is no possible way to protect yourself from the things that people may choose to do. It simply can't be done. Attempts to do so, whether by genocide or by any other method are doomed for failure because they ignore the fact that man has a volitional faculty. The problem here isn't an ethical one, it's epistemological. So maybe those arguing would like to visit the fundamentals a little more closely instead of shooting epithets around.

Careful there, you're applying a normative term (must) to something involuntary (nature). I think we've gotten a bit muddied up here. Greebo is correct, that it's not possible to act other than in accordance with nature. The thing is that the nature of man is such that he possesses the faculty of VOLITION. It is not that we choose to act in accordance with our nature, but that we choose to act in accordance with the methods that will, by our nature, result in our continuing to live. If we don't choose to act this way, we will, by our nature, die.

It's not a bad question, I'm surprised that people were a bit sharp in their answers. If you haven't already read OPAR, I recommend that you do, because Peikoff talks about the primacy of existence, which is what you seem to be having an issue with here. The point is that perception doesn't create reality, so if someone's perceptions are limited in an atypical way (such as with a color-blind person) or faulty (such as with a delusional person), they still are not perceiving a *different* reality. They are perceiving the same reality, with a different or broken apparatus. But because reality is independent of the observer, it is possible for us to either abstract away the different parts and say "oh, you're color blind", or simply verify the broken parts and say "oh, you're delusional".

Not sure what you mean by this. Man has a nature just as rocks and trees and coffee mugs have a nature. If we *didn't* have a nature, that would mean that the Law of Identity doesn't apply to reality, that A is not necessarily A, that contradictions CAN exist. It would also mean that there's no way to know anything at all, and in order to prove anything, you have to be able to know SOMETHING. (If we can't know anything, there's no point in having any kind of discussion or of doing anything--we are helplessly at the mercy of an unknowable universe. We can simply throw that conception out the window as absurd, obviously absurd, axiomatically absurd.) Therefore, the law of identity does apply, man is man. Now, what man is may be up to some debate--you can't form conclusions about what man is by pulling them out of the air, you have to go out and observe men and form conclusions based on your observations. A lot of people stumble when integrating Objectivism because they think that the entire philosophy is *deduced* from the axioms instead of each stage being *induced* by reference to observational information. The statement Man qua Man just means that we're talking about, specifically, the characteristics that differentiate man from, say, plants or other animals rather than the characteristics we have in common. The main differentiating characteristic is that man has the faculty of reason and must use it in order to survive. The fact that reason is a requirement of survival militates against any scheme for preventing men from reasoning so that men can "survive" qua animals (living in caves or concentration camps) or qua plants (hooked up to some sort of Matrix-like control device) or whatever people want to propose for letting you "live" without living as a rational creature. Somebody's reason has to create the means by which the victims of the Matrix or the concentration camps will survive--so the contradiction is clear. You cannot dispense with reason and the nature of man--man has to survive AS MAN, by the means and methods of men. Attempts such as these to reduce life to a Social Darwinistic Hobbsian war of all against all for brute animal or even vegetable existence are doomed to failure because of this inherent contradiction.

There's such a thing as a non-altruistic religion? Your friend has asked the impossible because he's basically asking you to produce a shortcut that reduces complex abstract knowledge to the perceptual--he is being concrete-bound in an extremely obnoxious way AND demanding that YOU be as well when you should know by now that the concrete-bound approach does not work and is no way for a human being to exercise their rational faculty. Statistical representations ARE used in first forming principles and then illustrating the operations of those principles, but the principle-forming process consists of ANALYZING that statistical data and figuring out WHY it came about. You are and should be interested in causal relationships, while your friend is just looking for correlations.

You are dropping the context of values here completely and adopting an idealistic or Platonic approach instead of an objective one. Romantic love is not about the other person, it's about you. You fall in love with someone not because you're hopelessly enthralled by their values but because you want to gain the immense pleasure of having someone who shares your values. It's perfectly rational to choose someone as your partner, not because they're the most virtuous person you've ever met but because they are very virtuous but also physically attractive and AVAILABLE. There is no virtue in pining hopelessly after an *unattainable* ideal. Life is meant to be lived, not sighed over. Now, this doesn't mean you should surrender to any little obstacle that comes your way as "it's not meant to be" and accept whatever comes easiest as a result. What it means is that you have to make a rational evaluation of the total situation and decide which course is best FOR YOU, which it sounds like is precisely what you did. And since you know you did it, you happily embrace the result as the very best that was possible to you and love your wife. Congratulations.

This is generally backed up by my personal (anecdotal) experiences in these areas. For some reason, people (especially guys) who are quite comfortable with homosexuality imagine that everyone ELSE is homophobic. I've known a couple of people now who have served in units where "everyone knew" that a couple of the soldiers were gay even though they weren't open about it, and nobody cared. Those commercials where drunken beefcake guys are uncomfortable and paranoid around gays are a joke. Even more so the ones where they're afraid that other guys will think they're gay. In real life, if you accuse a guy of being/acting "gay", one of the following happens: 55% He laughs and tells you that YOU'RE gay 35% He plays it up for further laughs 9% He actually is gay 1% ERROR REDO FROM START Once you hit age 25, I've found, the proportion of people who are actually capable of getting their feelings hurt and worrying about things like this goes WAY, WAY DOWN.

Precisely. But moral and illegal are not the same thing. Ethics and politics are not the same discipline. While it's immoral to torture an animal for fun, it should not be illegal, whereas assaulting a human being regardless of claimed provocation is properly illegal. There is no question of how the use of property "affects" you as long as it doesn't violate your rights. The only effect on you that the law is properly concerned with is some kind of violation of your rights. A man torturing a dog (assuming some other factor is not involved) is not violating your rights. Now, as for why a proto-rational human (or one without the ability to ever become fully rational) has rights, that's based on a complex logical integration regarding the function of principles in human cognition. Keep in mind that the fact you are not entitled to use force does not mean that you have no options. Pull out a video camera and inform the person that you're putting them up on YouTube. In a fully free society, their bank would be free to foreclose on their house, their boss to fire them, the local grocer to refuse to sell to them, etc.

I hope they do, but they're matter-of-fact about it. Kids are resilient when it comes to these sorts of things--they don't get hysterical because they don't have the context of an adult. Better to grow up knowing about it and being coached by benevolent adults on how to deal with it than to suddenly find out when you're 20. And they WILL find out eventually. I find it interesting just how much attention they give to the supposed excuse in this short article, though. I'd like to see a comparison to a similar story with a different excuse.

These are all approximations, they do NOT necessarily apply to individual cases. My roommate and I have the same size feet (we can wear the same shoes comfortably, and do sometimes), and I'm 4 inches taller than he is with longer arms, even though he has long arms for his height (he has a long torso and short legs--kinda cute and stubby.) I also have significantly larger HANDS than he does, even though our FEET are the same size. Not everyone has exactly the same proportions. It is a fact.

Well, the Miranda warnings are based on the premise that it's not legitimate for law enforcement, in a country which respects individual rights, to obtain confessions or other information by misrepresenting those rights or by taking advantage of people who don't know or understand their rights. It's not really a philosophical issue, it's a legal one. Are people's rights better protected when the police are required to inform them of their rights as part of the arrest procedure or not? Are the POLICE put in a better position when this kind of precaution is taken (their arrests aren't constantly being invalidated because it's been shown that they didn't exercise due process)? This is a technical matter, not a philosophical one. Philosophy will tell you that people need rights and what they are, but determining the best methodology for protecting rights in specific circumstances requires further study of those circumstances and seeing what the actual results are of different policies. Personally, I think it would likely be shown that the Miranda rights do no harm and potentially some good, particularly among foreigners who may be ignorant of U.S. procedures and have a residual fear of police that they gained in their country of origin.