TomL

Good. Now look up "tonal" in a dictionary. It means a sound of specific pitch, duration, and quality. Change duration while on the same pitch, and you have a tonal variance. Change the quality of the sound with the same pitch and duration, and you have a tonal variance (for example, a trumpet playing the same pitch and duration as a flute, or even the same as an electric guitar -- different quality). Quality can be many different things such as: clean or distorted, loud or soft, muted or exaggerated, harmonic or discordant, or a number of other variations I can think of. Each of these falls under the category "tonal variance". Because you do not like certain qualities of tonal variance (or do not acknowledge anything as a tonal variance other than pitch) is in no way "proof" that "metal is noise". While I will agree with you that late Metallica is very primitive, not all metal music is like them (and I dare say, that Metallica post-1990 is not even metal, but nothing more than distorted pop music). If it is tonal variance you seek, try some Symphony X on for size and tell me they are "simple". There are free MP3's of Symphony X available from the band's official website. In the context of this thread, I would recommend the songs "The Accolade" and "Awakenings".

What a man cannot do in this universe is stop his faculties of reason and volition from functioning, without killing himself. And if he cannot do that, then he cannot relinquish the rights which are caused by the existence of those faculties.

No. You are either not grasping or evading the definition of "right". A "right" exists only in a social context, as a negative obligation on others. Rights as such impose no negative obligation on oneself. To kill oneself does not involve "rights" one way or the other, "rights" involve only what others may not do to you.

Not at all. You may kill yourself if you have no rational reason to continue living, but you cannot sign a legally enforceable contract with someone else to kill you. If he kills you, he is a murderer, contract or not.

Let me continue it, then. A "right" is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. A man alone on an island needs no rights, because he need not impose a negative obligation on anyone in order to freely use his mind to choose his own actions to further his own life. Now, you can see that the right to life is given rise to by the fact that men have reason and volition -- they must choose their own actions if they are to live. "Life" as a slave is not "life". You cannot abdicate your powers of reason and volition in your own mind. You cannot "turn off" your brain; its always going to work, as long as you draw breath. No matter how enslaved you may become to another man, you can still think for yourself. As long as you can do that, then you can choose your own actions, and you thus you have a right to your own life. The only way to cancel your own right to life is to kill yourself, or give yourself a frontal lobotomy. Anyone else doing it is murdering you, regardless of any legal contracts. A legal contract cannot nullify your ability to think for yourself, and thus cannot nullify your right to your life.

You need to study Objectivist epistemology a little in order for this to make sense. Read "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" by Ayn Rand. You will discover that your emotions are the products of your repeated thoughts and ideas over time, and if you are consistently wrong with an idea or judgement, they your resulting emotion in a certain context will also be wrong, and thus you should not trust them. To be integrated means not only grasping a hierarchical set of premises, but also using them to train your subconscious to give you the right emotional response in a given context. And until you accomplish that, you must not rely on your feelings. They will deceive you.

Only if the pleasure in using ones senses and using one's mind to process the sense data to find harmony/inconsistency with one's own emotional responses is "sheer nonsense". Only if one finds pleasure in not having to use one's mind, and can simply "let go" and "feel" whatever may come.

If its not a big deal, then why are you writing a book about it? How much interest is enough to ask a woman out? I would contend that there must be serious interest before asking a woman out. Dating for dating itself isn't going to lead anywhere real except by blind fortune. One must introspect, identify one's highest virtues -- practice them first-handedly (thereby programming one's emotional mechanism properly) and learn to identify those virtues in another person. If there is sufficient cause to warrant romantic involvement. Otherwise its hedonism. Oh ... my ... goodness. The lack of investment is not what should give a man confidence, but his own surety in his own efficacy, and in the consistency that his emotions have with reality. Not for a man whose emotions are consistent with reality. And he must do this by knowing that if he is rejected, it is either because the woman cannot evaluate him properly, or she doesn't hold the same values he does. Thus, it is not a loss. But if he's only confident because he doesn't care about her (his "lack of investment"), then its a pretext. Absolutely. But attracted to them why? The main issue here is programming your subconscious through a chosen, explicit process with chosen, explicit premises that are consistent with reality. So that when the emotion is felt, you can depend on it. If you don't do that first, your emotions aren't worth spit. The reason that most men are blubbering idiots around gorgeous women is that they have no confidence that their emotions are valid with respect to reality, and for good reason. They don't bother to program their subconsciouses properly first. Knowing Objectivism is one thing. Using it, practicing it, doing it, will change how you feel, and you can't short-circuit that process by simply dismissing one's bad emotions with "well, I'm not super-invested". What does "super-invested" mean that "invested" doesn't?

You're asking the right questions now. This is definitely good progress What's next, you ask? You have to decide what you value, what principles to live by, and thus who you are. How do you do that? You need a philosophy. A philosophy will act as the rules by which you live: how you decide what to value, how to act in order to gain those values, and how you should feel about them. For a man with such questions, obviously looking for a philosophy, the next step I recommend is to do some reading. If you would like to be entertained while you learn, read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. If you want to go straight to the "meat", read The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand. Either of those will give you the clues you need to continue your quest for self-esteem and happiness (two very closely related terms, it turns out). You must learn to think in principle, which is the most difficult thing anyone can learn to do, if one doesn't do it already. By the way, I am a very happily married man, with the woman of my dreams. It is possible to marry a princess; I've done it

I have no problem with your dissatisfaction with Megadeth, that's fine. But I've found it accurate that people who consider metal "noise" do so because to them that's what it sounds like. In order to appreciate metal, one needs a very careful ear and a brain that can distinguish very small, very short notes. When the listener does not have this capacity, the notes all blend together into "noise", like static on a TV. Part of the pleasure in listening to metal is in the focus one needs in order to discern what is going on musically. Compare to listening to POP/dance music, which requires no focus whatsoever to hear and process 100% of the intended notes.

Well if that's all you need, jump in the Live Chat whenever you're on your computer and leave that window on the side while you post and whatnot in another window. I'll be happy to chat with you as I'm sure others in there will, but there isn't someone always chatting 24/7. I check periodically and if there's someone new I'll strike up a conversation. It's the next best thing to sitting at a table with a bunch of Objectivists.

Romantic Manifesto pb. 43 The part of RM most relevant to this topic is Chapter 4, dealing with relationship between art and cognition and touching on music specifically. Basically, all forms of art except music deal with entities and work in the same manner as the normal epistemological process of man: one perceives the piece of art through sight and/or touch, and then the brain processes the information to reach the abstraction the artist intended, and then feel an emotion in grasping it. Music does not work that way, but rather the reverse. In hearing music, one feels the emotion first -- musical tones reach the subconscious directly, without a stop-over in the conscious mind. One can then go backwards episetmologically, through introspection, to discover the causes of it if one wishes to. Romantic Manifesto pb. 52 So, a nihilistic song lyric does not necessarily mean that the notes one hears and the melody of the music itself will make one feel "nihilistic". All that a nihilistic song can do is make one grasp that the composer is either depressed, angry, flipppant, or any other range of emotions that could come from nihilism -- but it can't make you feel any of those emotions unless it crosses your own sense of life, and then you will feel it to the extent that it does so. I grasp far more emotions in Megadeth than I feel myself, but there is some cross over. The most important part here is that it is the music which conveys the emotional content, not the lyrics. The biggest part of my cross-over with Megadeth is the emotion of "eagerness" conveyed through the speed and crispness of the notes. I, too, am eager. Not for the same things as Dave Mustaine, but we share at least that much -- and that is all I get from it. It is this sense of eagerness that is pervasive throughout the kinds of metal which I personally enjoy. The faster, the better. Personally, I do not like Metallica (post 1990) or any of Kiss. In fact I do even consider Kiss to be heavy metal.

You all need to read Romantic Manifesto if you haven't already. There have been a couple of threads in the last month also where the judgement of art has been discussed. Art can be appreciated not just for its subject matter, but also for the skill with which its concepts are recreated by the artist. For example, Ayn Rand read and enjoyed Dostoevsky -- arguably one of the most nihilistic writers since the invention of the pen. While his ideas she found deplorable, she admired him for his skill with which he elicited emotions from his reader. I listen to heavy metal; it is my favorite genre and has been since I first discovered it. Today, I find Symphony X to be my favorite, because they have both a wonderful sense of life in the stories of most of their songs, and skill in that every member of the band is a virtuoso and the composition is very effective at conveying the intended emotion. I also enjoy Iced Earth, especially their most recent effort The Glorious Burden, which is a very patriotic album: freedom loving and respectful of the people who died to provide our freedom -- but their earlier subject matter, though dark, also shows a tremendous amount of skill in both instrumentation and composition. Another band I enjoy with a mostly positive sense of life is Kamelot, or at least the one album of them I have. I would like to get more from them. Dave Mustaine of Megadeth is very nihilistic, but very skilled at what he does and I can't help but enjoy his compositions. I have and enjoy every Megadeth album on a regular basis, and do not feel that the nihilism of the lyrics has any lasting effect on me. Its OK to appreciate artists for their skill, even if they have the wrong ideas, because the skill itself is manifested in the achievement of a goal. The only thing is one must not confuse this appreciation of skill for the appreciation of the ideas, and one must not allow others to presume that because you like Megadeth, that you agree with Dave Mustaine's philosophy.

I own a small ISP; I love to do network engineering and UNIX system administration. I can imagine several ways one can increase one's value in the industry, but let me simply relate what I did. I initially was a programmer. I came into the industry without a degree and quickly discovered that in order to get a higher-level (higher-paying job) I would need experience. So what I did was: I approached every programming job and every interview with the idea that I would work for practically nothing in order to get the experience. A small company with a tight-wad of an owner liked the idea of getting a cheap programmer and hired me. I was young and didn't need much money to support my lifestyle, so this trade worked out very well for both of us: he got his cheap programmer for a few years, and I got the valuable programming experience for my resume. My next job started me at more than twice the salary as the first only a few years later, and I was able in a few months to save up for a down payment on a house.

I already explained that, but apparently you ignored my explanation. There is no easy way out here. You will have to think for yourself on this subject, or you will get nothing except fleeting gratification in the short-term, and misery in the long-term. No one can explain to you what your values are, why you value them, and whether or not those values are rational. Only you can do that for yourself. It requires a philosophic foundation of premises, logic, and introspection. There is no short-cut that anyone can offer you. We can only offer you the guidance to begin thinking down the correct path, but cannot give you the answers to questions concerning your own identity. If you choose to ignore my earlier explanations because they lack the immediately and concretely graspable answers you seek, then ultimately you will fail in achieving the utmost happiness you can for yourself. That is, after all, the reason you want to have sex right? Because you think it will make you happy? By the way everyone: iouswuoibev is right. The premises of the original poster, however wrong and horrendously ridiculous they may be, are very prevalent in our culture. This forum is a publicly viewable one, and it is an opportunity for us to state the correct ideas for the record, for everyone in the world to see. If only a few people read and agree with our ideas, even if its not the original poster, then we have accomplished something very selfish for ourselves.

How long are you going to be there? Since you seem to have access to a computer, you can also obviously share your ideas here and in the Live Chat. If the people who live states away have Internet access, you can also talk to them using voice-over-IP. The beautiful thing about our modern technology is that any isolated corner of the globe is no longer isolated. You have many, many different means of communicating meaningfully with your peers, no matter how far away they are. If your time on the computer is limited and your isolation is for a limited time, it could be an opportunity to do some serious reading. You could also pursue a hobby such as drawing or composing music. I have so many things I wish to do and so little time to do them; if it were me who were thus isolated, I can't imagine running out of ways to keep myself occupied and productive.

To continue your parking analogy: during the massive netsplit which you so conveniently forgot to mention, not only was there no one in the "parking space", and there was no "reserved" sign (X), but the parking lot ceased to exist itself. Now how is anyone supposed to stay in their parking space when there's no parking lot? The fact of the matter is, despite Bearster's absence, there were other ops present except during the massive netsplit which you took advantage of to seize the channel. That is not just "happening" across it, but a coup, with deliberate and malicious intent. Of course, azr|el has already admitted that he new Bearster ran the channel before he joined it, and we also know he was banned from it. Thus it is now impossible for him or anyone else to say that he just "happened" to find it available, and had no idea that anyone would be there. He had prior knowledge of its existence, and his whole purpose and intent for taking the channel was not because he wanted it or that he is a fan of Ayn Rand, but that he is a hater of Bearster. Basically, the only reason he took Bearster's "parking space" was because he doesn't like Bearster. It has nothing to do with his allegedly being a fan of Ayn Rand, which, based upon the IRC logs we've seen and his actions, is most likely completely false. The whole thing is a big ruse just to deny someone else something that they've had for many years, out of spite and malice. While it is true that the channel control itself has changed hands according to the terms and conditions of the network owners, there is more to a channel that the electronic construct "#channel" present in the IRC servers. A channel consists also of the people in it, the environment they create for themselves, the nature of the ideas they share, and the comraderie of the participants. It is this part of the definition of "IRC channel" which you attempt to deny by saying "Get over it". And it is this part of the IRC channel which no one besides its creator, not even the owners of the network, can claim ownership of. All of these things over time become linked to the electronic channel construct, especially when some participants do not return for weeks or months at a time. And it is this very part of the channel, the non-coporeal essence of an IRC channel, the part which you don't want anyone to notice the existence of -- which you wish to destroy by seizing control of it.

Yes. No one here is going to help you do that. Sex should prerequire a very serious relationship. No Objectivist will ever suggest or help you do otherwise. When I said the reasons you have for thinking that 'banging whatever you want' are most likely not wrong, what I meant was this: Sex is not dirty in the sense that religious people think. Sex is good. But sex also requires something from your mind, not just your body. It is no more a mere writhing of animal flesh anymore than you are merely an animal. You are a rational animal, with reason, volition, and very powerful emotions, and by your nature you must integrate them all. You can no more turn off your emotions any more than you can make your heart stop at will. If you fail to integrate them and instead achieve hedonism, you will only serve to weaken your self-esteem, not build it up.

I am a happily-married man, after a long search. Let me tell you what I know from first-hand experience. You started out with a brief laundry list of things to describe yourself. These are the things you thought would be most relevant, or most essential to obtaining your desire. You mentioned that you were: funny, good looking, average height/weight, skinny and into sports. None of these things are essential to what you really ought to be seeking. You then said that you were a social worker, but then later identified yourself as a "depressed artist". Let me ask you something: is being a social worker what you want to do with your life? Then you reveal that you would like to get "laid" more, but you also have a feeling that its morally wrong, but you're envious of others who get "laid" a lot. Let me tell you something: your feeling that its wrong is correct; those who 'bang' whatever they want are wrong. Further, you should not base your desires on what other people get, but only on what you want for yourself. Forget what the football players and such do. Your life and your happiness do not depend on them. They depend on your decisions and your actions, no one elses. Ask yourself why you have a feeling that its wrong to 'bang whatever you want', without trying to convince yourself that the reasons are false. They most likely are not. You will find that it is not women that you seek, but rather a woman. There is a huge difference. And the more you inspect yourself, the more you will be able to define logically, what characteristics that woman will have both physically and mentally. When you ask yourself "why me?" with regards to approaching women you find beautiful, you are really asking a question of yourself in a much broader context. "Why me?" means "Am I worthy?" What makes you worthy of someone's affection? What is there of you for someone else to love? Reading psychology books will tell you that its about self-esteem, but they won't tell you how to get it. In order to achieve self-esteem, you must use reason to set goals for your life, and then take action to achieve them. Once you have achieved them, you will feel proud of your accomplishment -- that is self-esteem. You will hold yourself in high regard as a man who is efficacious. When you have that, a woman -- the right one -- will notice, and let you know she's interested. The key here is that the goals you set for life, while they may include romance, cannot be primarily "romance". You have to choose your life's purpose (for me, computer networking) and take steps to achieve that purpose, and actually have something for which you can be proud of yourself. Then, and only then, are you ready for romance. To quote an Ayn Rand character from one of her novels (and probably not precisely): "In order to say 'I love you', you must first know how to say the 'I'".

There was no such sign. Where was it posted anywhere explicitly that the channel was abandoned? There is a difference between a house with the door wide open, and a house with a sign on it that says "abandoned". The channel was in the former state, not the latter. If you feel no guilt and have feel completely righteous in your actions, then why do you need logs to prove anything? That says all it needs to say about your alleged status as an Objectivist. Any real one can see right through this. Objectivists consider ideas important, and your statement says explicitly that ideas are "pointless" and "mental masturbation". You would allow anyone free reign to say anything they want; including yelling "fire!" in a crowded theatre. Why did you want it? You've already given the answer because you mentioned what you thought of Bearster's management before you were even asked. It is not an assumption that you own these channels, as you've admitted to it. What that says about your character, regardless of the reasons for your ownership of them, is clear. You consider the channels important for some reason, either because you agree with them or think they hold some merit that you wish to suppress. Either way, you sanction the ideas that the channels represent.

Philosophically, a manufacturer needs to provide no justification whatsoever for the terms upon which it sells its products. If it says you have to jump through a fiery hoop and bark like a dog or it won't sell to you, then those are its terms and you can take 'em or leave 'em. Your only choice is: is it worth the product (or future profit) to have to jump through that particular hoop?

... and a desire to take it, stemming from a desire to deny Bearster what is rightfully his. The Undernet AUP says nothing about property rights with respect to channels, only to the conditions for channel service. What is property? What makes it belong to one man and not another? Bearster is a fan of Ayn Rand. Is he welcome? What about his friends? How about the idea that you and your friends are thieves? Am I free to come in and discuss your thievery with anyone that joins the channel? You can always go and make your own channel. There's nothing to be gained by seizing what is not yours. There is now no possibility of "freedom" in #aynrand, since it is ruled by those will take whatever they feel they deserve at the first opportunity. Even if your hostility is limited only to Bearster, you are still hostile. Would anyone else as sure of himself and what he wants be met with the same hostility?

There is a 'bot present, but that does not guarantee control of the channel during massive netsplits. #aynrand used a 'bot also, and their current status proves that it only helps, but does not guarantee. The 'bot can get disconnected in a net split, just like anyone else.

Species do not adopt philosophies. Only individual people do that.

I wasn't suggesting that you said that. I was asking if you are saying that the self-esteem one celebrates when having sex has nothing to do with the self-esteem one gains from efficacy as man qua man, but only from one's "efficacy" at what.. sex? You're good at sex, so that gives you the esteem you celebrate in having sex? If not, where does this esteem come from? What I disagreed with before was the direct comparison between the emotional payback of eating a bag of chips and having sex. The two are not emotionally equivalent. Ayn Rand is using food & hunger to illustrate that urges do not tell you how to satisfy them, which is a different comparison altogether. She could just as easily have made this comparison using any metaphysically-sourced desire other than hunger.