Jon Letendre

You mean the 2022 Amnesty International report?
Yes, you are correct, I did not address this and I regret it. I focused on your denial of the principle/rule that, in a rational debate one has the obligation to justify one's claims, if asked. I looked back on your older comments in this thread and I found out that now is not the first time that you deny the legitimacy of this rule.
OK, now about your argumentation with this report. 
I asked you to provide facts justifying your claims/conclusions. But instead of facts, you pointed me to a source claiming those same conclusions.
Yes, I guess that that 280 pages report does list some facts in support of its conclusion, but the problem is : if I disagree with the truth o those facts and/or conclusions, to whom I address my objections?
Therefore: take your claims one by one and justify them. 
(Besides, by unreservedly recommending the AI report, you will also have to justify/prove every one of its claims, if asked. This is how it works!)
Here is a free😁advice for you: Only by researching a subject yourself can you justify your claims; merely reproducing the conclusions of others risks embarrassment.

So a modern day promoter of modern Nazism and terrorists in SK is going to be allowed to post here?

So you don't interact with Zionists?

😆
Israel is an ethno-supremacist genocidal apartheid regime formed by Zionist terrorist groups in the '40s. To call it "mostly free" is a blatant falsehood. France is "mostly free". Japan is "mostly free". Israel is complete and utter garbage by any rational metric, barely a step above a totalitarian state.

So where is this supposed lie by omission? The PLO did "terroristy" things so they cannot possibly be secular? You're literally just stringing loosely related factoids together hoping that they will somehow constitute a coherent argument.
 
 
Oh, ok, so I see you're agreeing with the "Israel is hilariously and dangerously stupid"-theory. Argument over.
 
 
"Herp-derp, you're dumb because look at all this unrelated garbage I posted." Maybe focus more on BASIC LOGIC before insulting other people's intelligence.

According to Plato, known existents are actually shadows or copies of pure Ideas located in the Hyperuranion. Likewise, in a materialist framework, mental "existents" (percepts) are mere shadows or copies of pure Things located in the Physical™ world.
The idea is that mind-stuff is unable to produce matter, because of the Law of Identity: mind-stuff has an identity that is toto genere different from the identity of matter. On the other hand, matter can easily produce mind-stuff because.. it just can, okay?
Peikoff is constantly oscillating between different meanings of the word "consciousness", according to what is convenient for his purposes. At the beginning of the quoted part, he takes "consciousness" to mean passive awareness of objects; he then shifts to a broader meaning which encompasses volitional aspects, like fantasizing/desiring that the food disappears.
It doesn't seem to occur to Peikoff that, as per the Law of Identity, even if a mind was able to productively create the entirety of the contents of consciousness, the creative process itself would not be "free", but constrained by certain laws. I'm free to draw a line in my mind, but I'm not free to do so without making use of point and space. The laws of geometry are the necessary "stage" for freely drawing the line, which is to say: the mind produces not just one kind of representation (drawing the line) but also the representation of the lawful backdrop (point and space).
Metaphysics is not as simple as trying to make food disappear.
Here is the original claim:
And this cannot be stressed enough. Man can err, yet at the same time be completely convinced that he is merely "following reality". Try to challenge his assertions, and you're met with replies such as "Well.. is 2+2=4?!", implying that, since he was merely following "reality", his conclusion was pristine and perfect.
The only "authority" is intellectual honesty when dealing with reality.

Rand was onto this back in 1968. After Robert Kennedy was killed, a lot of his voters went over to Wallace, the lowbrow populist, and she observed that this should not surprise anybody:
It is enormously significant that in many sections of the country (as indicated by a number of polls) former followers of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy are switching their support to George Wallace. At a superficial glance, this may appear to be a contradiction, since these two figures seem to represent exact opposites in their political views. But, in fact, it is not a contradiction: in terms of fundamentals, both Robert Kennedy and George Wallace are "activists" - i.e., men who proposed (and clearly project the intention) to take direct action, action by the use of physical force, to solve problems or to achieve (unspecified) goals. In this sense, both of these leaders are symptomatic of a country's intellectual and cultural disintegration, of the ugly despair which seizes people when - disillusioned in the power of ideas, abandoning reason - they seek physical force as their last resort.
Most of the voters who liked Wallace eventually came home and voted for Humphrey. If the parallels hold, this predicts that most Kennedy supporters and a fair number of Trump supporters will come home to Biden.

Earlier in the primary season Trumpists encouraged or aided Green crusader/anti-vax conspiracy nut RFK, Jr. -- first as a primary challenger to Joe Biden and then as an independent candidate for the Presidency. They did the latter because they saw him as doing more damage to Biden's prospects than to Trump's.

I disputed that idea months ago, in part due to the kind of voter that finds appealing the likes of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump -- and historically, George Wallace and RFK, Sr.

This morning, I ran across a piece at UnHerd that comments on what it calls "the growing RFK Jr. coalition." It comes from a far-left perspective -- given away by its assertion that the Kennedy's relatively sane position on Israel is a liability.

Most interesting are its quotes from disenchanted Trump supporters:Uh-oh.

As a conservative said of Steve Bannon's earlier promotion of RFK, Jr., "Blame Bannon. His monster got out of the cage."

Here's another one of those voters, as well as a Trump supporter who doesn't quite fit that mold:To borrow from the UnHerd piece, the reasons former Trump voters might defect to RFK, Jr. range from the credible to the crankish, but I think it is a real possibility that a second candidate positioning himself as outside the establishment is more dangerous to the other such candidate among voters most unhappy about that establishment.

-- CAVLink to Original

About a year ago, Florida enacted a draconian anti-immigration measure that, as I put it, "conscript many otherwise productive Floridians for border patrol duty."

Predictably, this is now damaging its economy:The article notes that this artificially-induced labor shortage is not just increasing produce prices: It's poised to damage the state's economy to the tune of $12.6 billion in added costs.

The NPR piece correctly advocates immigration reform, but I have noted before that this should also include citizenship reform, as, in the long run, abolition of the welfare state. As I said of that last, years ago:Conservatives like Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are eroding America's proud and prosperous history as a destination for hard-working and enterprising people from around the world.

Instead, they could be making it easier for people to get here and stay here, and for those of us already here to keep our own money, while also benefiting from the chance to trade with the world's best workers and customers.

-- CAV

P.S. On the subject of immigration reform, I highly recommend the talk embedded below.

Link to Original

Print my whole statement. No, nevermind. I'll not bother with you further. 

Via the Harry Binswanger Letter, I learned of a fantastic editorial from the British press regarding the situation in Iran and what the West ought to do.

In "Iran Is About to Start a Nuclear World War -- and the West Is Determined to Lose," Allister Heath makes the following statement, which would have been obvious decades ago, but is controversial today:Heath contrasts this with the actual policy of evasion and appeasement the West is continuing instead, which he demonstrates is a serious danger by placing this conflict within its broader context of warmongering by the authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, and North Korea: "[T]he Islamic Republic is the weakest link, the least difficult one to deal with today, if we had the sense to act."

I highly recommend reading this rare jewel of clarity and urgent call to action, and publicizing it by whatever means one has.

-- CAVLink to Original

Since he became speaker based solely on his loyalty to Trump -- a man who would throw his own mother under the bus on a whim -- I had an extremely low estimate of Speaker Mike Johnson.

After he ignored such luminaries as Marjorie Taylor Greene to pass a military aid package, that estimate is slightly higher: He would seem possessed of enough low cunning or even common sense to know when and how to work with political opponents to achieve a goal.

Writing at UnHerd, Fred Bauer outlines the ways the other Trump loyalists (who are now calling for Johnson's head) screwed themselves by preemptively writing off any and all cooperation with the Democrats:Just as Bauer accurately describes how the populist kook wing of the GOP got nothing by demanding everything, I believe he pretty accurately foretells the future when he considers the deep reflection this should cause among them, but won't:The likes of Greene are so blinded by rage at the left that they cannot see how stupid they are behaving or entertain the idea of achieving part of what they want, under the current political makeup of the legislative and judicial branches. I am no fan of Joe Biden, but this is a textbook example of how not to win against a political opponent, and I can't think of a political faction I'd want doing this more.

The silver lining here is that Johnson has shown that there is room for a halfway sane legislative agenda to get passed in a closely-divided House: There will be enough center-left and center-right votes to pass measures that aren't too nutty for every member of either party to block, and that the authoritarian wings of each party can be marginalized.

One cheer for Mike Johnson.

-- CAVLink to Original

If one is an independent thinker, living in objective reality, one would say, "What are the facts?" If one isn't, then one may say, "conspiracy theorist" or "conspiracist", and not really know what one is saying.
"The labelling of (ill-defined) "conspiracist" is frequently used to intimidate, discourage, and dismiss examination of facts that contradict the official, authorized, mainstream narrative. "Conspiracy Theories", as a pejorative label, was first propagated to marginalize those who pointed out counterfacts to the official "lone-gunman" explanation of the JFK assassination. And again employed against the 9/11 "Truthers". So, it's not unexpected, that it's being used against the "covid deniers". But being used here in a forum of independently thinking Objectivists should be just an aberration." (From here.)
"How do you define "conspiracist"? You repeatedly resort to using "conspiracist" as if it can wipe away facts; in this case, the fact that no documentation has been found or presented for the isolation, purification, and distinctive identification of SARS-CoV-2 (with properties that causes the deadly and contagious Covid-19). " (From here.)
 

G.K. Chesterton is mostly right.
'I stated  later that objectivism [sic] posits goals “that are not even desirable: commitment to the maintenance of a full intellectual focus, to the constant expansion of one’s understanding and knowledge, and to never permitting oneself contradictions. If any individual were truly as devoted to these goals as the objectivists [sic] urge him to be, he would be compulsively rational­­ and therefore inhuman and irrational.' -Albert Ellis, Is Objectivism a Religion?

The Golden Mean is contextual and rational. 
"False. A workaholic lifestyle is a pretense, not an excess." Obviously wrong. It could be pretentious excess, but it is still excessive.
"False. There is no such thing as excessive pride. Arrogance is false pride, it's a pretense, because it doesn't have the reality to back it up." False pride and arrogance are similar but not synonymous. Arrogance does not equal false pride. Perhaps you should use an older dictionary.
"False. Emotional repression is false rationality, it's a pretense that consists of evading one's emotions." Emotional repression is not the same as "false rationality." They aren't even in the same category. 
Productivity, as used by Rand, is a floating abstraction. "All work is creative work if done by a thinking mind."(?) The idea that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, while obviously false, would include the writing of Mein Kampf and Das Kapital as creative, productive works. 
From: https://www.objectivistliving.com/topic/12562-albert-ellis-n-branden-debate/
It's the "nothing but" type of thinking that takes it to the extreme.
"Nothing but" productivity? Workaholism.
"Nothing but" rationality? Emotional repression. If you say emotions are included in rationality, you got it from Rand who got it from NB.
"Nothing but" pride? Arrogance. Lack of humility. 
"Nothing but" independence? This leads to missing out on the valuable insights of others.
"Nothing but" justice? This leads to a "show no mercy" mentality. 
"Nothing but" integrity? This leads to unnecessary moral rigidity.
"Nothing but" honesty? Sure, if you like hurting people's feelings. But we don't care about that, do we.

Plainly, this forum has degenerated to the point that intellectual honesty is no longer a value

"The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum." David Odden

Yeah, it's nice to meet you, too.
Honestly, and people wonder why there aren't more objectivists when this is how we treat each other. Flaming is not fun at all. Who wants to join a philosophy where your own fellow compatriots treat you just as terribly as they'd treat a welfare parasite?
If you actually want to have a civilized discussion about this, then I'm all for it, but I don't think you're open to changing your mind anyway.
But for now I will say that whoever you import has no "right" to vote for a socialist party. Or, preferably, no right to vote at all.

If you get between me and an immigrant/foreigner who I want to trade/associate with on my property, you can just plain fuck off. I don't care what philosophy or "objectivism" you think you've modeled, your "right" to force me can go to hell.

This is unsubstantiated. Since this is a disagreement, you'd need to go a step further and cite a source. I can't find evidence to say you are wrong unless I know how you got information that's different than mine. I don't think there is any evidence that assimilation is as pervasive an issue as you suggest.
But then there is a racist claim as part of your reasoning. You say Third World culture is based on reason. That's fair. But how does that mean the immigrants who leave are a cause of that. They're -leaving- that country. The only way I see to suggest that immigrants from those countries worsen the US due to being from there. In other words, this reasoning is tribalistic (and such tribalism isn't tolerated for long 'round these parts). Your line on the Chinese is probably most racist of all.
Ok, pamphlets. This is a far cry from an attempt to invade.
Jurisdiction. It's a practical extent to which rights-protection is feasible. As long as the people in the jurisidiction respect rights (invading armies and rights-violating criminals aren't those) their rights out to be protected and defended. But my issue is that here you are saying Mexico is a narco-terrorist state based on apparently fears of how those Mexicans, will -of course- be parasites, criminals, or savages.
 

His "principle" is popularity. His position is always what is going to make him look "big".
 

There are 30 million people here illegally, probably more. Not even Crackpot Kim could hope to muster up such an army. While not every member of this "army" takes welfare, commits crimes, brings disease, or refuses to assimilate and learn English, a huge number of them (millions) do. Would you agree that criminals, welfare parasites, diseased people, and people who will not learn English do not belong in this country?
Considering that in Mexico, the government runs ads on the streets encouraging people to come to America, I would consider that very good evidence of an invasion. Mexico does not enforce their side of the border, in fact they even offer legal assistance to people who are going through deportation procedures.
The wall will help us determine who is a threat, and who is not. It will force them to only use the gates. Otherwise they'll just swim the Rio Grande or cross the desert and we have no idea who they are. Mexico is literally at war with cartels, and there is no way to stop the cartels from spreading here. Which they have.
Individuals of this country, not individuals who are citizens of Mexico. If the proper role of government is to protect the rights of individuals of any country, why not invade Mexico and force their government to provide basic human rights to their citizens instead of being a narco-terrorist state?
Because most of you listen to the so-called Ayn Rand Institute and its Ayatollahs, Brook and Peikoff, without thinking for yourself. Ayn Rand herself never advocated for unlimited Third World immigration. Why? Because it is not in America's national self-interest for its people to be overwhelmed and replaced by people from the Third World who Ayn Rand called "savages."
I'll pimp HandyHandle's website here because he says it far better than I could...
http://ariwatch.com/AynRandOnImmigration.htm
 

Well, no. There is no evidence that there is any invasion of by criminals, thugs, or welfare parasites. That's just a Trump belief, not a fact. Invasion applies to warfare or coordinated attack. That some illegal immigrants commit crimes is not good evidence of an invasion. Besides, the proper role of government is to protect the rights of individuals. If invasion occurs, there needs to be evidence that those invaders are violating rights. It's not really defense without a plan to improve identifying threats.
This is what most of us would say here I suspect.

I voted for him just to prevent the socialist disaster that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been.
His stances on the campaign trail and what he has actually done in office are incongruous in many respects. The Syria strike was a big disappointment, as are many of his appointees' neocon blustering against Russia.
It is still too early to say what ultimate impact he will have, however his biggest accomplishment thus far is appointing Justice Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Hillary would've given us another Ginsburg. Then you could've kissed goodbye to the Second Amendment. Trump has also stepped up border enforcement, and illegal crossings are down. The proper, objective role of government is to protect the homeland from invasion. You can't do that without border enforcement. We are being invaded by criminals, thugs, and welfare parasites and if the only legislative accomplishment that he gets done is building the wall, then it will be worth it.

His Twitter account suggests otherwise.