Invictus2017

I suppose I should have said Representationalist (I think that's the term, it's been awhile).  This differs from Idealism in that, supposedly, the objects of consciousness have some (unknowable) relationship to reality, whereas Idealism supposes that the objects of consciousness are, in essence, illusions or hallucinations, unconnected to reality.  In my view, there is no real difference between "there is an unknowable connection to reality" and "there is no connection to reality", so Representationalism is a species of Idealism and I tend to use the latter to refer to both.
The notion that the objects of perception are mere constructs of the brain is Representationalist, in that it does not allow one to know how these constructs derive from reality -- any such knowledge would be just one more construct.  "Brain" is just a construct, and there is no reason for believing that there is "brain" or anything else.  (Which illustrates that Representationalism really is Idealism.)

I've been up to my ass in alligators for the last few weeks, which is why I haven't done more than read this forum.  But this one I have to respond to.
Whether a country is free or not does not depend on the particulars of its laws and institutions, but instead depends on the principles informing those things.  The Founders gave us a Constitution based on individual rights and limited government.  But the Supreme Court -- which decides the actual principles that run this country -- has repeatedly affirmed that the rights that our Founders intended us to have must give way to asserted government necessity -- asserted by the government, that is.  Moreover, in 1824, in Gibbons v. Ogden, that court decided that the principles that the Founders intended to inform and limit the powers granted to the government by the Constitution were to be ignored when interpreting the Constitution.  It has by its decisions removed both individual rights and limited government from the principles that animate our government.  The government we have and our lack of rights are not products of accident, nor are they incident to evil government officials, they are a consequence of those principles.
Similarly, whether a person is evil or not depends on the principles he espouses and lives by, not on whether he does or does not act like a monster.  The man who pushes FDA control of drugs is just as evil as the criminal who would break into your home and steal the drugs you need.  The man who pushes licensing of hairdressers is just as evil as the man who would burn down a hairdresser's shop.  The man who pushes government control of sex -- whether it be deciding who may marry whom or whether one may buy or sell sex -- is just as evil as one who would enact the biblical law requiring the stoning of homosexuals.  Do not confuse "pleasant" with "good".  And remember that the filth that runs our government got elected by people who know -- or who chose not to know -- what that filth stands for and wants to do.  Listen to your neighbors and what they say, hear their words, and ask yourself what principles underlie those words.  You will not hear misinformed or thoughtless would-be libertarians, never mind Objectivists, you will hear reality-rejecting, rights-ignorant, would-be thieves, kidnappers, and murderers, people who are so craven that they won't even do their own dirty work, but will instead hire it out to the cess-pool inhabitants of government.
So, yes,  I agree with the OP.
But it is equally true that there is no better place.  The best you can do is go somewhere like Europe where they don't pretend so hard that they're individualists.  You won't be any more free, but you won't see quite so much hypocrisy about it.
My own answer is to start a society elsewhere.  I've set up a web site, https://cityofenterprise.wordpress.com/, to get my project off the ground.  Please drop in if you'd like to contribute, or just to kibitz.

(putting on grammar nerd hat)
As relevant here: "Guys", plural, is synonymous with "people" and has no gender implication, as contrasted with "guy", singular, which is synonymous with "male person".  So his "Hi guys!" was no more than a friendly greeting to whoever might read his post.
 
 

This remains true.
I'm out of this discussion, since I can see no benefit to myself from further participation.

Of course it is always possible to put things on a scale -- if you're willing to adopt an arbitrary scale.  So what?  The arbitrary is not of value.  The mere fact that you can compare characteristics does not mean that the resulting ranking is meaningful.  That you can rank values based on some feature of values in no way proves that there is a meaningful way to rank one person's values against those of another.  I say that you can't do it at all, because the relevant scale for each person's values is his own life.  You have yet to provide a reason for me to think otherwise.

It's a tricky topic, but for present purposes it suffices to say that existents are commensurable if they can be meaningfully ordered by some property.  E.g., rocks are commensurable in that they can be meaningfully ordered by hardness.  But you can't say that rocks are commensurable in that they can be classified by type; there is no non-arbitrary ordering of the types of rocks (as far as I know).  Similarly, colors are commensurable because they can be meaningfully ordered by how they appear in a rainbow.

We agree on these.
The discussion at hand comes from the notion that person A can get more from a voluntary exchange than person B.  For example, in one exchange, I get 10 dollars, you get a book.  To me, the 10 dollars is worth equal to or more than the book.  To you the book is worth equal to or more than the 10 dollars.  But what standard are we going to apply to say that I got more value getting 10 dollars and losing the book than you did getting the book and losing the 10 dollars?  What scale are we going to rank the value differences on so that such comparisons can be sensibly made? (For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that we get value differences by measuring values on some scale and taking the difference.  Dealing directly with value differences is more complex, but leads to the same conclusion.)
My claim of incommensurability is that no such scale exists, outside of two useless (in this context) exceptions.  The first exception is the arbitrary scale, like assigning random numbers to things so that they can be "measured" that way.  The second involves scales that deal with something in addition to value.
Suppose, for example, that we used a scale of "survival importance", where we'd rank each value by an estimate of how long the person to whom it is a value could survive without it.  This wouldn't be very helpful with the example I just gave, because the durations of our lives are unlikely to be affected by whether or not we make the exchange.  OTOH, were I destitute and needed that 10 dollars to get a life-saving medicine, we could say that I got the better of that deal by this particular standard.
What makes this standard special?  Nothing.  Actually, because most exchanges don't have any determinate life-duration consequences, this is a particularly useless standard.  But we could have other standards; one for each way of measuring values.  We might assign to each value the time needed to acquire it, the money needed to acquire it, the degree of subjective satisfaction the value gives to the possessor, and so on.
The mere fact that there are more many such standards makes it clear that none of them can serve to address the problem at hand.  Any claim that I got more than you would net the immediate response of 'by which standard?" the answer to which could then be met by "oh yeah, well we're going to use this other standard instead".  There'd be no resolving this because, ultimately, there can be no answer to the question of which extrinsic consideration is the "right" one when addressing this problem.
What we need, instead, is some way of comparing values as such, without bringing in extrinsic considerations.  It is this that I am saying doesn't exist, when I say that values are incommensurable  There is no way to order your value qua value against my value qua value because the there are two different standards involved --  your life and my life.  You can measure your value against your life and I can measure my value against my life, but the one measurement has no relationship to the other.
Measuring units by their commensurable characteristics may or may not be arbitrary, depending on the purpose of measuring  That certainly applies here, where there is no particular reason to consider one attribute of values as being "the" attribute for comparison purposes.

I will not do your thinking for you.

Values, in general, go toward different ends -- particular lives.

Your values and my values are incommensurable, because they serve different ends. It is therefore an error to even try to determine whether you get more from an action than I do.

The benefit to others is irrelevant to the question of whether an action is egoistic.  All that is required for an action to be egoistic is that the action be directed to one's own benefit.  Whether another benefits or is harmed, and the degree of that benefit or harm, has no bearing on whether the action is egoistic.

The essence of Randian egoism is a hierarchy of values rooted in that which is necessary for a human being to survive as required by his nature.  Each value must, in some way, contribute to that specific form of survival.  The virtues are principles that, enacted, result in gaining and/or keeping such values.
At this level of abstraction, it would be improper to have, as a beneficiary of one's acts, anyone other than oneself.  But as these abstractions are particularized, as one fills in the relevant values and virtues, it becomes apparent that some actions can be taken that also benefit others and, concretely and short-term, benefit others more than oneself.  This would be true in relationships, where one might act "altruistically", benefiting others, to satisfy the long-term goals of gaining or keeping appropriate relationships.  Or politically, where one might act "altruistically" by putting one's life on the line to protect one's society.
Such "altruism" is not justified on the premise that the good is that which benefits others.  (Hence the scare quotes.)  Rather, it is justified on the premise that to obtain certain values -- a proper relationship, a proper society -- values that benefit oneself -- one must put others' immediate welfare above one's own immediate welfare.
If, at this point, one drops the context, ignores the value hierarchy, one can mistakenly see a mother's actions that benefits her child but cost her dearly, or a soldier's putting his life on the line and even losing it, as actions "for others", a sort of altruism that egoism supposedly rejects.  But keeping the context, it's clear that the person who chooses motherhood also chooses the emotional bonding that requires that she "sacrifice".  But she does so for the long-term benefits of motherhood, as she conceives them.  Similarly for the soldier; if he chooses to defend his society, he also chooses the soldierly virtues that go with it, which may involve "sacrificing" his life.
Keeping the context, remembering that humans have a nature, and refusing to accept contradictions -- those are how and why Randian egoism, even though it requires that the beneficiary of one's actions be oneself, also permits and even requires acting for others, sometimes even "sacrificing" for others.
 
 

The essence of Randian egoism is a hierarchy of values rooted in that which is necessary for a human being to survive as required by his nature.  Each value must, in some way, contribute to that specific form of survival.  The virtues are principles that, enacted, result in gaining and/or keeping such values.
At this level of abstraction, it would be improper to have, as a beneficiary of one's acts, anyone other than oneself.  But as these abstractions are particularized, as one fills in the relevant values and virtues, it becomes apparent that some actions can be taken that also benefit others and, concretely and short-term, benefit others more than oneself.  This would be true in relationships, where one might act "altruistically", benefiting others, to satisfy the long-term goals of gaining or keeping appropriate relationships.  Or politically, where one might act "altruistically" by putting one's life on the line to protect one's society.
Such "altruism" is not justified on the premise that the good is that which benefits others.  (Hence the scare quotes.)  Rather, it is justified on the premise that to obtain certain values -- a proper relationship, a proper society -- values that benefit oneself -- one must put others' immediate welfare above one's own immediate welfare.
If, at this point, one drops the context, ignores the value hierarchy, one can mistakenly see a mother's actions that benefits her child but cost her dearly, or a soldier's putting his life on the line and even losing it, as actions "for others", a sort of altruism that egoism supposedly rejects.  But keeping the context, it's clear that the person who chooses motherhood also chooses the emotional bonding that requires that she "sacrifice".  But she does so for the long-term benefits of motherhood, as she conceives them.  Similarly for the soldier; if he chooses to defend his society, he also chooses the soldierly virtues that go with it, which may involve "sacrificing" his life.
Keeping the context, remembering that humans have a nature, and refusing to accept contradictions -- those are how and why Randian egoism, even though it requires that the beneficiary of one's actions be oneself, also permits and even requires acting for others, sometimes even "sacrificing" for others.
 
 

No.  So long as a statement is arbitrary, "imaginable" -- other than in a fictive sense -- is not relevant.  It's a category mistake.  The only thing you can do with an arbitrary statement is to find something, some relationship to your context of knowledge, that makes the statement non-arbitrary.  Only then can you properly talk about whether the thing is imaginable or possible.
I'd say that if someone brings an arbitrary statement into a discussion, you should ignore it.  I'm pretty sure that that's what Peikoff meant.  But this doesn't mean that you must ignore them in every possible circumstance.  You may, as I suggested earlier, look for something that makes the statement non-arbitrary. 
"Arbitrary" applies to statements; "floating abstractions" to concepts.  What they have in common is that neither has a relationship to one's context of knowledge.
I note that SL suggests a gradation of "floating" in floating abstractions.  There's a similar gradation in "arbitrary".  The distinction here is between abstract classification and practical thinking.  A statement is either arbitrary or it is not, a concept is either a floating abstraction or it is not.  But you may not know which without thinking about it.  So, in that sense, you can legitimately work with arbitrary statements or floating abstractions and even treat them temporarily as legitimate.  But only to ascertain their relationship, if any, to your context of knowledge.
 
 

This is incorrect.  "Arbitrary" has nothing to do with truth or falsity, possibility or impossibility.  Like floating abstractions (see the recent discussion), arbitrary propositions have no connection to reality; they're mere concatenations of words that follow the syntactic rules of propositions.
Assertions about truth and possibility (or their absence) are about knowledge.  If a statement is not knowledge, it is a category mistake to even ask if the statement is true or possible; it is the same sort of error as asking if a concept has polkadots. So, before wondering if a statement is possible, you must first know that the statement is some kind of knowledge.
Knowledge is the product of integrations of percepts.  A statement that does not derive from percepts is not knowledge.  Now, we have the notion of "the matrix" from science fiction (and earlier), but no percepts from which one might derive the possibility that such a thing is more than fiction.  Without that, it is simply an error to ask if "the matrix" is possible.
"But that's not satisfying!"
Awww. Poor baby.

Actually, those are two different things.  "True" and "false" are applicable only where there is some connection to reality.  A floating abstraction, not being connected to reality, can be neither true nor false.  But your general point is correct: When talking to most people, merely pointing out that they're employing a floating abstraction is useless.
 
There's a difference between erroneous reasoning and no reasoning at all.  A fallacy is an improper method of reasoning.  A floating abstraction involves no reasoning at all.

Well, sorta.
Consider an infant, operating without benefit of words.  His brain forms associations, which he tests by what we as adults would call experimentation, but which is play to the child.  The mere association would be a floating abstraction, but the repeated testing is a primitive form of reasoning that suffices to remove the resulting concept from the category of "floating abstraction".
Anyway, I was listing examples of what sorts of methods of acquiring a concept would make it a floating abstraction.  Purely undirected (which is what I meant by "random") associations would be floating abstractions.  Other kinds of associations might or might not render the resulting concept a floating abstraction.
Adopting a concept without considering the concept's roots in reality renders the concept a floating abstraction.  Because rocks are rather concrete, it would be hard to acquire the concept "mineral" as a floating abstraction, but I suppose it's possible.  The issue of floating abstractions generally arises with concepts further from the concrete, where it is easy to collect the words and imagine that one has actually said something.
Agreed.  There are all sorts of reasoning (or unreasoning errors), and we can only talk about them sensibly if they're in determinate categories.  "Floating abstraction" is one such category, and we shouldn't try to subsume kinds other errors into that category.

As a general rule, stories need conflict; there must be something that the protagonist wants to do and something that keeps him from doing it.  Dystopias provide a more fertile ground for conflict than utopias.  It's just that simple.
Also, when the theme of a story involves society, it's almost always necessary to show a malfunctioning society in which to express thematic conflict.  E.g., it would have been hard for Rand to have done what she did in Atlas had she set her story in something like Galt's Gulch.  Similarly, Atwood's story (I haven't seen the dramatizations) needs its dystopia in order to most effectively make her points.
I note that Atwood was hardly the first to see the possibility of a Christian dictatorships in America.  E.g., Heinlein did it in 1940, in "If This Goes On".

Peter Suderman of Reason Magazine argues that, "Under Trump, Republicans Have Become the Party of No Ideas." Suderman makes some disturbing connections of data with his thesis, such as the following:

Signs of this were evident during the campaign, as Bret Stephens noted in the Wall Street Journal back in 2016, when he commented on the leadership of the GOP folding like a cheap law chair after Trump became the nominee:
But lest you think Stephens is some kind of prophet, consider the following words, written over a half-century ago by Ayn Rand:
This is what Rand said of the conservatives back then, when they still were pretending to offer an alternative to the left. Suderman and Stephens rightly observe the effects of what Rand discussed then, but they don't go far enough. It's not just that the conservatives failed in 2016 or now -- it's that they are no longer even bothering to pretend to be serious opponents of the left. Whether that be because they don't know or don't care what will happen as a result of failing to do so, is as irrelevant as they will prove to be in the long term.

As for anyone not wishing for a Bernie Sanders's version of the American dream (as is being realized today in Venezuela), I strongly recommend reading the entirety of Rand's Conservatism: An Obituary. We need ideas, and if Donald Trump has given us anything more than a few random rollbacks to particularly bad regulations, it is this: He has shown -- sooner rather than later -- that the GOP is not the "party of ideas" we need for an actual return of America to the greatness of capitalism.

-- CAVLink to Original

America's "best" is determined by reference to its adherence to the principles that gave it birth: individual rights and limited government.
America abandoned the principle of limited government on March 2, 1824, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Gibbons v. Ogden.  In that case, the Supreme Court enunciated the principle that, in determining what powers the government has, the intentions and arguments of those who wrote the Constitution are to be ignored; the only limit to government power is to be found in the bare, uninterpreted words of the Constitution.  As we see today, that limit is essentially no limit at all.
America never implemented the principle of individual rights.  The Constitution placed limits on what the federal government could do but, as initially written, placed few limits on what the state governments could do.  The states routinely violated individual rights, most notably with respect to slavery, but in numerous other ways.  They mostly operated on statist principles, with the individual subordinate to state and local governments.
In theory, the 14th Amendment brought the states to heel, requiring them to respect the rights putatively protected by the Constitution.  However, the Supreme Court did not use the kind of reasoning it had used with respect to the powers; instead of taking the Constitution at its word with respect to rights, it routinely and uniformly subordinated the rights protected by the Constitution to the needs of the government.  It still does this.  A right that can be abrogated at "need" is not a right respected by the government; it is, in the eyes of the government, a privilege that can be modified or revoked as it sees fit.
America has never lived up to its founding principles.  Its legal system, which defines its actual principles, has always been hostile to those founding principles.
America, the land of individual rights and limited government, does not exist and has never existed; the question, as asked, has no answer.  The closest thing to an answer is "the American Revolution", that period where people put their blood, treasure, and reputation on the line to the service of liberty.  Nothing since comes close to the America that should have been.

Not quite.  I don't have a reference, but what various Objectivists have said is that you should do your own philosophical thinking (as you should do all thinking) and live by whatever you conclude.  You should do this even if the result of your thinking is not Objectivism. If you err, the fact that you erred while reasoning leaves open the possibility of discovering your mistake.  If you didn't reason, you have no way to know whether or how your philosophy is wrong.

But what's the point of your argument? Let's put aside the data, because none of us are going to agree with the validity of it, there has been enough scholarly criticisms of your viewpoint no one is going to agree with whatever links you're posting.
Suppose there are two people, A and B. A tests a IQ of 120, B tests an IQ of 119. Ergo what? What inferences, in terms of political philosophy, follow from this?

"Rights" is not a floating abstraction.  It arises from a consideration of what humans require to live, what this implies about the proper society for humans, and what each individual should do in such a society.  One of the essential facts relied on in the derivation of rights is that humans survive by means of the use of their rational faculty.  Take away that fact and the derivation falls apart.  Thus, unless an organism survives by means of reason, it cannot be said to have rights.

"How do I live in a country…"
…This translates (to me) to mean, how do you manage your frustration with things you think are never going to get better?
Universal Health Care is a scam.  The people pushing it know its never going to work.  The more they push it the worse it gets.  Which intern insights delusional people to scream louder for it.  The terror of death is what keeps it going.  Everyone wants to live forever and they will give their last dime, their home, any legacy they have for their families future, and get themselves in hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt.  Just to stay alive as a guinea pig for another couple years.  This is what they want the government nanny state to pay for.  
Cry SAFETY!!  The ultimate tool of stagnation.  No one is safer than the man is a straight jacket in a padded cell.  Death is so horrifying for most mystics that they will buy any snake oil that promises eternal life.  The safest sounding prescriptions from the oldest biggest churches.  All hail big FDarma.  
 
It is difficult for a person who doesn’t want “power over another person” to understand, communicate with, or come to an agreement with a person who does want power and does want control over others.  They want so much control and power, that they perceive your refusing their power or control as another power/control tactic.  
“Attention whore control freak” is a label that pops into my head more and more as I contemplate the problems in the world that my mind can’t seem to turn away form.  
Every mystic who stands in front on the pulpit is desperate to keep their audience attention.  Their focus is not on quality, but on quantity.  They get people to listen by playing to their weakness and telling them what they want to hear.
Every decision in an irrational person’s life seems to be rooted in fear.  They are so saturated with fear that telling them they do not have to live a life of fear causes them panic and terror.  As though you are taking away their only protection, their only lifeline.  The alternative you offer them seems impossible for their atrophied mind to grasp, the amount of mental effort to get themselves to a better place is alien.  They can not see the context of the better place, they only see the loss of their traditions, and their feelings of belonging.  Are you offering them anything better really?  Does your approach reflect how ‘good’ your own system is?  
It seems so much easier to be a forgiven sheep, than it is to stand up as a man.  
Calling them evil is making yourself a target.  JudaeoChristian values have survived for 5000 years, as countless others have fallen or been absorbed.  The Bible is full of the ample examples of physical and psychological warfare they have engaged in.  Have you ever read the Bible?  Do you even know who your enemy is?  They are masters of war, and your cries of despair fuel their fire.  
Darwin states that it isn’t the strongest or the smartest that survive, but the most adaptable to change.  The Judaeo/Christian movement has certainly adapted.  
How long will your own personal movement last?  Are there paths that will help mystics adapt to greater and greater rationality?  

 

Running naked through the park:
Yes you've identified a crucial problem with "public property," that is, property that has no clear owner, there is no way to regulate conflicts regarding its use without resort to arbitrary solutions. Now, Rand describes a free society in which all property is privately owned. But let's make an allowance here for some sort of land as you stipulate.
Private property has its foundations in the Lockean homesteading principle, that which is unowned and I mix my labor with becomes my private property. Note that this doesn't mean all property has one single individual owner, that would be the fallacy of composition. There are of course "group owned" properties and corporate entities allow for a legal method to deal with this.
Legal doctrine has traditionally allowed for some sort of "commons" area or such associated with small towns or villages. A village is built, and there is a small space in the center reserved as a "town square" that people agree is available for general use. Or consider a fishing village near a lake, in the early days of the community it was hard to get to the lake because of all the brush and debris, but the path was slowly cleared over the years and not by any one single effort, but by the combined effort of walking through the path over time. I think there's also records in England of private roads that were built during the 19th Century and then donated to public use (the builders had businesses alongside.)
So there's a public space in each of these, but what is the sense in which it is "public?" Surely it isn't truly "unowned," the village or townsfolk own it. And surely it isn't "government owned," or "owned collectively by the human race" or some such nonsense. It would simply be corporately owned by the actual village and they can set the community standards for their space. Surely I, as an outsider, cannot just come to their square or path and block it off for my own personal use, nor can I start streaking. As to how they go about decision making? They can vote, they can set up a board, they can have meetings, they can take disputes to arbitrators, they can form a homeowners association. They can leave rules real loose, or they can really get down and dirty and decide who the real owners are: Sam, he didn't really clear any brush, and Jones, he was lifting fallen branches every day, Sam gets a single share, but Jones gets a 20% share, whatever. You get the point.
On the last point, pollution: certainly you have to provide proof of harm. And certainly our understanding of what is harmful changes over time. That's why issues are solved through tort law, not legislative law. This specific person harmed this specific person. And multiply it many times for class action suit, even for hypothetical massive cases. Objectivists accordingly view these issues like climate change as scientific issues, not political ones. One looks at scientific evidence, in a court of law, and if the plaintiff proves their case, then the court stops the pollution. Environmental crusaders are always looking for problems to solve, instead of becoming lobbyists and trying to buy influence from politicians, their efforts would be better served in a more Randian society as litigators for the aggrieved. But what Rand was truly opposed to was the ones that claim humanity must subordinate itself to instrinsic value of nature, or that civilization's progress must be stopped.