Jon Letendre

Boydstun is not smearing you. The problem is in your head. 
Urgently go out and seek psychiatric help.

The Bulwark is rubbish if this is indicative of their views!

"Myth No. 4: Trade and open markets create "a race to the bottom."
That's how Jon Stewart decries globalization on his show, saying, "Globalization allowed corporations to scour the planet for the cheapest labor and loosest regulations!"
----
That problem child, "globalization", would be fine and dandy when governments are barred from entry, economy and state kept strictly apart . Individuals (and companies) deal and trade with others, wherever and whenever they see opportunities and at their own risk. As it is, the large corporates operate "hand-in-glove" with their Gvt which in turn makes deals with foreign gvts. That is then, corporate-globalization, backed, and given entree by, the power of states.
Corporatocracy plus statism.
(which gives spurious credibilty to socialists who claim capitalism = imperialism ("/neocolonialism")
As good a place for this essay by Jeffrey Tucker
https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-american-capitalism-mutate-into-american-corporatism/
 

Boydstun, I think in the spirit of your personally being “not purely egoist”, you might consider it important to sketch, if only in broad strokes, the bones or main structure of your ethics (which you deem are on a solid footing) in a sort of “introduction” which you might be able to expand upon if the finitude of life’s span permits, but which nonetheless represents the unwavering unshakeable base you have already formed, and upon which any remaining  more detailed formulations and expositions are to be made.  I propose a sort of ITBE (Introduction to Boystun’s Ethics) even if only in essay form, but possibly of any length or of any title, again in the spirit of how crucial the philosophy of ethics is and your being “not purely egoist”.  

I think many in the world are pivoting away from old conflicts defined in terms of polar opposites which are not at play right now as they once were.
When the world is seen as filled with mostly "good" cultures and societies which generally value peace, autonomy, family, life, happiness, for everyone... the philosophical quibbles over just what the good is and why, and how best to achieve it can be real and indeed can be very contentious and stark:  Atheism versus Religionism, Capitalism versus Socialism, but in the end they are not existentially and urgently crucial.
Christians have been quite harsh on "heretical" or "heathen" thinking for quite some time and the vehemence with which the Atheists "rebelled" against Christianity, religious and mythical thought is quite breathtaking.  But over recent times I think many feel that the animosity between generally good people over these issues is rather small potatoes.
For the world is now seen as having a sort of "thing" working in the background, of people whose motive is sheer political and economic power, whether governments and bankers or oligarchs and powerful families etc. or all of them... it possesses an unmistakable "evil" culture which does not value peace, autonomy, family, life, happiness, for everyone... instead valuing those for some: personal friends and family, and are happy to "pay the price" of consigning everyone else to their antitheses : war, authority, isolation, misery and death.  
What point is there to fight over just exactly what good is and how to get there when a faint but clear harbinger of cultural evil.... atheist non-moral anti-human post-modern evil that is arising.  Whether or not consciously emerging from the nexi of power, or whether unconsciously emerging in the psychology of culture which has lost the basis of its morality and has not discovered objectivism, the inhuman evil is now at work here. 
 
It makes sense for those that hold humanity, human life, individual life and liberty in high esteem to band together for humankind.  It has been happening.
 
Craig Biddle debated with Denis Prager a few years back putting forth the position that they should not fight... Prager at that time was stuck in the mind set that he must scare people back into religion with the bromide "without religion morality is impossible"... as if membership in the good camps was more important than sheer numbers of good people.
Richard Dawkins has announced that he is an "Atheist Christian"... quite a claim to unpack but nonetheless one which is symbolic of a real spiritual and mental alliance ... good people who still value humanity and life on earth as free individuals with peace, autonomy, family, life, happiness, for everyone, NOT just some people, should and will come together.
 
Of course the "thing"'s activity in sowing divisions is accelerating, men against women, blacks against whites, left against right, atheism against religion, Christian against Muslim...
 
Christians citing Objectivism and Objectivists reaching out to good religionists is a good thing and all individual human loving people need to come together.

—SDF Tractors
"ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food" 
OK. I would not need to discover it because my parents taught me how to do it, and in my childhood we did just that—enough fruit and vegetables (and honey) for the family for the entire year. How to grow it, to process it, and to preserve it. We got pork or beef by butchering it out on Grandparents' places, which were largely self-sufficient farms, where my parents grew up during the Great Depression.
What America did you think you were addressing, writer? Folks like in Manhattan? Only office folk across the country too good to ever get their hands dirty and who don't know how the store food is produced? THAT was NOT the only American audience existing in 1957. Welcome to the rest of America and their abilities.
There was not some sort of genius, like Galt or real ones, who invented tillage or the plow. The civilization in which those techniques first came about evidently did not know or have a clue that plowing would so enhance productivity. They invented it for other reasons of labor, as mentioned in the quote. 
My paleface ancestors came mostly to what is now MD and VA, including the part of VA where we live today, in the 1600's. At that time, it was all trees here, and to make a field, to till and plant, many trees had to be removed. They had iron axes and crosscut saws and knowhow from their parents. Bless all who brought about those tools and all who contributed to their invention and production. And in current practice, bless all the engineers and manufacturers and service workers who make my chainsaw possible.
But not forget that we the readers of Atlas Shrugged are not all so devoid of hands-with-mind and love of it and so helpless as to deserve the demeaning rhetorical: "ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food." We do not depend from some speculated individual mind envisioning the important result and inventing the practice of plowing for higher yields, but on many minds accumulating success across the centuries to our own minds and ways of survival. 

Calling "sanction" occasions of failing to recognize evil and take actions to oppose it is incorrect English, a smearing out of the term sanction.

This is incorrect and a very dangerous idea many have taken away from reading Rand. (A related incorrect take-away, which Rand later, correctly, denounced and clarified, is the idea that evil is impotent.) Evil is not always dependent on a sanction, and when it is, sanction from most anyone will do. Sanction from the (forum-shopped) witch doctor is common. Navalny did not sanction the evil of Putin, and he was brutalized and murdered by Putin all the same. Realistically, sanction from the victim is generally not a worthy sanction to the evil doer. To the evil doer, the sanction of the victim is generally as irrelevant as the sanction, were such possible, of a rat or insect.
(Aside: Stalin fooled people into the "sanction" of not realizing that he was the reason they were forced onto a train to Siberia. They wrote him letters thinking that if he knew what was happening he would intervene.)
Ayn Rand introduced the idea of the sanction of the victim and the dependence of evil on it in a situation in which evil was an ongoing parasitism on the victim. I'd leave validity of the idea to that sort of situation, nothing broader.
One bad idea some readers take away from Atlas Shrugged is that they and their philosophical comrades are the Atlases holding up the world as in the book (kind of an iffy metaphor of the book, really, because of our modern conception of gravity) and that everyone else is significantly a parasite on them. No, our philosophical circle is not in that role. There are other real people who are in that role in this the real world.

What follows is Zelenskyy is currently president for life, or for as long as martial law is not rescinded. So elections do not matter at this time in the Ukraine, if they ever did, really.
I inferred from Stephen's post that he was criticizing the 'undemocratic' nature of dictatorships. By citing official statistics from regimes that charade about elections. I suspect too , that he is throwing shade at what he thinks Trump supporters believe about our recent and present cycle(s). Surely he must realize that Biden is a titular President, his own AG finds him incompetent to stand trial.

How is Zelenskkyyii polling in this cycle ?
 

https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/8/issue/25/world-court-finds-us-attacks-iranian-oil-platforms-1987-1988-were-not
I had not heard of the military action prior to clicking on the link and not sure how much credence to put on ICJ proceedings but seems they determined the US strikes on the oil platforms were not consistent a with self defense, defense.
I think the destruction of the Iranian Navy would have to precede from a declaration of war, no ?

Don't Tread on USA!
The US has said they will not attack targets inside Iran for their use of terrorist organizations to attack Iranian opponents. I hope, however, that the US has not taken destruction, sooner or later, of the entire Iranian navy off the table as among US retaliatory response actions.*

I do not advocate any of these things.
I think there's a confusion here between what the forum as a whole does (e.g., through moderation) versus what its individual participants do.
Part of this is the recognition that every individual participating here has the right to make their own judgment about which arguments are rational and why, as well as which arguments are worth responding to and which not. (And on the other hand, if they make invalid arguments, their arguments will be judged accordingly.)
I don't think such individual judgment should be usurped by the forum itself such as by banning arguments, which amounts to deciding that the participants shouldn't be allowed to see them or, possibly, that they shouldn't be allowed to make them.
I am aware that the resources of this (or any) forum are privately owned and that the owner can decide how they can be used. However, the amount of these resources for any single post is pretty small (and I'm sure the owners would like them kept small). Providing a public forum is not in fact a moral sanction upon everything people say there, just like giving away sheets of blank paper is not a moral sanction on whatever people happen to write or print on them. Nor can anyone who posts here claim (with any honesty) that their post, merely by virtue of not having been banned, is in agreement with the owners, or with Objectivism, or is any kind of award-winning great achievement.
Further, when the forum owners and moderators decide to exercise judgment about which posts are correct, then they are implicitly asking the participants to cede their right to make their own judgments. That becomes a cost for the participants, just as much as if you were asked to give up other rights you might have. They then have to consider whether it's worth it.
Maybe I helped precipitate this confusion by saying that the forum should conform to the Objectivist epistemology, but the role of the forum in the Objectivist epistemology is not to think for the participants but to make sure the participants are not blocked from thinking for themselves. Once one has decided to offer a forum, this becomes a negative obligation -- not a demand for more resources. (It is in fact banning stuff that requires more resources, because somebody has to make the decisions about what to ban, and those have to be checked for accuracy, etc.; this is why big companies like Facebook end up needing large censorship moderation departments where people look at posts all day, or else they need AIs to make those decisions automatically. It is why larger magazines need editorial departments to pore over manuscripts. It is why the East German Stasi needed so many people to monitor phone calls.)
Being open is a large part of what offering a forum is. That is the value it offers. It should be allowed to offer it.

There can be options in concept formation; the Japanese color 青い covers blue and also blue-green and maybe green in some contexts, and there are probably other examples where concepts in different languages overlap but don't coincide.
If this sort of overlap can happen between languages, it can also be possible between people who share the same language but perhaps aren't using a dictionary or aren't using the same dictionary. This doesn't mean that either one is non-objective, just as the difference in colors between English and Japanese doesn't indicate that either language is non-objective. The result of the difference is a lack of precision but not necessarily accuracy. Obviously, with differences in the units, the accuracy is slightly less, just like a translator might have to determine whether to translate 青い as "blue" or "green" in a particular context.
It's easier to be precise and to agree with things like the "meter" which can be measured easily than with things like the exact line of demarcation where a forum becomes something more like a magazine.
One could ask, what is the essential characteristic of a forum?
I was thinking of "openness" as an essential characteristic, and the reason I think it's essential is that a "forum" that isn't open is useless, not just to me but to everyone else; that's what makes openness essential.
This is not to say that "magazines" are invalid. There may be certain people whose opinions I care enough about that I might want them accurately represented. I might subscribe to their magazines. But it is telling that Leonard Peikoff, for example, hosted a Q&A, where he would answer questions, and he could pick and choose which questions he wanted to answer, and the answers were unambiguously his as opposed to what someone else thought he might say. It was a Q&A, not a "forum." He didn't host a "forum," invite people to post, and then ban opinions he disagreed with.
Also, Peikoff had already built his reputation, so people were interested in what he, in particular, had to say. What if you come up with a new idea? Where do you put it? Assuming you are not famous. Nobody approves of your idea yet because nobody knows what it is. Do you want to take a chance that you will get banned because people disapprove of it? Is it fair that you should have to take that chance? And what if you want to find new ideas that might have been come up with by other people, who aren't themselves famous enough to create their own forums? Where do you go to look for them? How can you find someone who runs a forum that allows new ideas, given that the forum owner has to take the risk that the new ideas might be wrong and that he has therefore sponsored wrong ideas?
If people have to censor ideas that they disagree with, people must have been grossly immoral for publishing Ayn Rand's books and ideas, since after all those people could not have agreed with the ideas already, since they were new. (Or else they were taking a chance on being immoral, sort of like shooting off a gun in random directions and being lucky enough not to have hit anyone. Which is also immoral. But anyway...)
A personal attack is an ad hominem, it's a fallacy. But the reason for banning personal attacks is not because they're ad hominem: the fact that they're ad hominem is what allows us to get away with banning personal attacks, because we know we're not accidentally banning any legitimate ideas.
The reason for the ban is because personal attacks tend to turn away the contributors who are attacked, and thus renders the whole forum useless to them, and less useful to others who might have wanted to read those contributions, or other contributions which might have never gotten made.
I don't know if I want to try to run an open forum, because people might join and then demand that I suppress other people's views based on arbitrary criteria. Or if I didn't have time to moderate it myself, I'd have to trust someone else, and then they might start banning people for disagreeing with their views, and they might do a lot of damage before I stop them.
I wouldn't want to run a forum where I banned people for disagreeing with me, either. What if I ban someone on an incorrect basis? It would ruin the forum for everyone and destroy its value.
Wikipedia used to be great, until a cabal of editors formed who decided to take it upon themselves to rid Wikipedia of views they thought didn't have sufficient "notoriety" (because it was embarrassing to them that some articles about popular TV shows were longer than articles about important historical events -- so all they did was go around deleting articles because they lacked "notoriety"). This mostly happened on the English-speaking Wikipedia. Later, another cabal took over, this one consisting of leftists (or maybe it was the same cabal), with the idea of suppressing anything critical of leftism. As a result, Wikipedia has become less valuable and less useful, unless you are a leftist. (You can still use it if you are looking for an idea a leftist wouldn't disagree with.)
That could happen here, too. The site might end up supporting, not Objectivism per se, but a particular flavor of it, and it could easily be the wrong flavor or a distortion, and no one would be able to say anything about it if it were. It would become an echo chamber.
I suppose this is a problem of the culture at large, that people no longer tolerate views they disagree with, and that they wish to silence those views rather than engaging them in debate (and they can't accept the idea of just leaving their opponents alone, either; they have to silence them). The silencing of people is the main thing I am objecting to here; if there is some error in my definitions of "forum" and "magazine" then that error is not essential to my objection.
Maybe this tendency to reject opposing views is a product of the current educational system (because I suspect that a lot of the people calling for this are younger than I am and it certainly aligns well with the leftists who are taking over the culture at large).
Maybe it's also a problem that people don't want to see views they disagree with, so they hope some moderator will step in and ban those views before they have to see them. That sounds like the "safe spaces" that are being promoted in schools and universities, too, and it's the exact opposite of "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion," which at least requires that you know what those facts and opinions are.

I suggest you read about genetics and evolution. It's not my job to do your thinking and learning for you. 

No, these are questions that can be answered via a Google search and study of the issue.  I meant exactly what you will find via study of the correct sources on the subject and nothing else. 

So you accept that rate of plant evolution is relatively linear? The proto types of the proto-types of tree/ferns mentioned were in the process of evolving for the prior 350 million years? I was under the impression that a rough estimate is like a billion years after the earth formed and ‘cooled’ , attained a state that we would recognize as earth like now, unicellular life got started and then maintained a rather static almost homeostasis rate of growth but not development , for as much as a few billions years of nothing but unicellular life forms until bam! eukaryotes!
I think eukaryotes fossils are like 1.9 billion years old , looks like fits and spurts there , but maybe linear if the ages are misaligned, I suppose.
And isn’t fossil fuels really a misnomer ? 

Sight of Superlative Achievement
Stephen Boydstun (2007)
My favorite character in Atlas Shrugged is John Galt. One of the crucial traits of this character is his extraordinary technical ability. I can adore a fictional character, and part of the reason I adore this one is his possession of that trait.
Adoration is one thing, admiration is another. Galt’s technical genius is admirable only in the derivative sense that I would admire that trait in a real person. I cannot admire a fictional character. I can admire the character’s creator as creator, but not the character.
Fortunately, there are in our time many individuals whose mathematical and scientific accomplishments are at the high level of the fictional character John Galt. They are not well known to the general public. I want to tell you about one such man.
Eli Yablonovitch invented the concept of a photonic band gap. He arrived at this concept in 1987 while doing research on making telecommunication lasers more efficient. Another physicist Sajeev John arrived at the concept independently that same year. John came to the concept in the course of pure research attempting to create light localization.
Four years later, Yablonovitch was the first to create a successful photonic band-gap crystal. He used a variant of the crystal structure of diamond, a variant now called yablonovite. The structure was formed by drilling three intersecting arrays of holes, 400 nanometers in diameter, into a block of ceramic material. This structure, at this scale, was able to eliminate the propagation of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range. Photonic band-gap crystals are yielding a new generation of optical fibers capable of carrying much more information, and they are contributing to the realization of nanoscopic lasers and photonic integrated circuits.
The name photonic crystal sounds like a crystal made of light. That is incorrect. A photonic crystal is an artificial crystal (or quasicrystal) made usually of solids such as dielectrics or semiconductors. The electrical properties of a semiconductor are intermediate between a dielectric (an insulator) and a conductor.
In a dielectric material, the valence electrons of the atoms are tightly bound to them. They are confined to energy levels within the band of levels called the valence band. Above that band of levels is a broad band of energies inaccessible to the electrons under the laws of quantum mechanics. That forbidden band is called the band gap. Above the band gap is a band in which electrons could move freely in the material if only enough energy were applied to them to raise them to that band of energy levels. This band is called the conduction band.
In a semiconductor, the valence electrons are less tightly bound to atoms than they are in a dielectric. The band gap is smaller. A smaller boost of energy is needed to induce the flow of electrons, a current. The degree of electrical conductivity of a semiconductor can be precisely controlled by doping one semiconductor chemical element with small amounts of another.
When an electron is promoted across the band gap, an effective positive charge called a hole is created in the valence levels below the gap. The holes, like the electrons, can be entrained into currents. By controlling the supply of electrons and holes above and below the band gap, carefully designed semiconductors are able to perform electronic switching, modulating, and logic functions. They can also be contrived to serve as media for photo detectors, solid-state lasers, light-emitting diodes, thermistors, and solar cells.
The properties of an electronic band gap depend on the type of atoms and their crystal structure in the solid semiconductor. To comprehend and manipulate the electronic properties of matter, electrons and their alterations must be treated not only in their character as particles, but in their character as quantum-mechanical waves. The interatomic spacing of the atoms in matter is right for wave-interference effects among electrons. This circumstance yields the electronic band gaps in semiconductors as well as the conductive ability of conductors.
A photonic band gap is a range of energies of electromagnetic waves for which their propagation through the crystal is forbidden in every direction. The interatomic spacing in semiconductors are on the order of a few tenths of a nanometer, and that is too small for effecting photonic band gaps in the visible, infrared, microwave, or radio ranges of the spectrum. Creation of photonic band gaps for these very useful wavelengths requires spatial organizations in matter at scales on the order of a few hundred nanometers and above.
In the 70’s and 80’s, researchers had been forming, in semiconductors, structures called superlattices. These were periodic variations in semiconductor composition in which repetitions were at scales a few times larger than the repetitions in the atomic lattice. The variations could consist of alternating layers of two types of semiconductors or in cyclic variations in the amount of selected impurities in a single type of semiconductor. These artificial lattices allowed designers, guided by the quantum theory of solids, to create new types of electronic band gaps and new opticoelectronic properties in semiconductors.
Photonic crystals are superlattices in which the repeating variation is a variation in the refractive index of the medium. It is by refractions and internal partial reflections that photonic band gaps are created. The array of holes that Yablonovitch and his associates drilled for the first photonic crystal formed a superlattice of air in the surrounding dielectric solid. Additional workable forms of photonic-crystal superlattice have been demonstrated since that first one. Costas Soukoulis and colleagues created a crystal of crisscrossed rods, and it has yielded photonic band gaps in the infrared part of the spectrum. Photonic crystals have been created mostly in dielectric or semiconductor media, but Shawn Yu Lin and associates have created them in tungsten. These may prove useful in telecommunications and in the conversion of infrared radiation into electricity.
In 2001 Eli Yablonovitch co-founded the company Luxtera, which is now a leading commercial developer of silicon photonic products.
Photonic crystals, manipulators of light, they are alive “because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power—of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form.” –AR 1957 (re diesel-electric) 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Scientific American
1983 (Nov) “Solid-State Superlattices” –G.H. Dohler
1984 (Aug) “Quasicrystals” –D.R. Nelson
1986 (Oct) “Photonic Materials” –J.M. Rowell
1991 (Nov) “Microlasers” –J.L. Jewell, J.P. Harbison, and A. Scherer
1998 (Mar) “Nanolasers” –P.L. Gourley
2001 (Dec) “Photonic Crystals: Semiconductors of Light” –E. Yablonovitch
2007 (Feb) “Making Silicon Lase” –B. Jalali
 
Science News
1991 (Nov 2) “Drilling Holes to Keep Photons in the Dark” –I. Peterson
1993 (Sep 25) “A Novel Architecture for Excluding Photons” –I. Peterson 
1996 (Nov 16) “Light Gets the Bends in a Photonic Crystal” –C. Wu
1998 (Oct 24) “Crystal Bends Light Hard, Saves Space” –P. Weiss
2003 (Oct 4) “Hot Crystal” –P. Weiss
2005 (Nov 5) “Light Pedaling” –P. Weiss
 
Nature Photonics
2007 (1:91–92) “Bandgap Engineering: Quasicrystals Enter Third Dimension” –C.T. Chan
 
Fundamental Papers – Physical Review Letters
1987 (May 18) “Inhibited Spontaneous Emission in Solid-State Physics and Electronics” –E. Yablonovitch
1987 (Jun 8 ) “Strong Localization of Photons in Certain Disordered Dielectric Superlattices” –S. John
1989 (Oct 30) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case” –E. Yablonovitch and T.M. Gmitter
1990 (Nov 19) “Full Vector Wave Calculation of Photonic Band Structures in Face-Centered-Cubic Dielectric Media” –K.M. Leung and Y.F. Liu
1990 (Nov 19) “Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures: Bloch Wave Solution of Maxwell’s Equations” –Z. Zhang and S. Satpathy
1990 (Dec 17) “Existence of a Photonic Gap in Periodic Dielectric Structures” –K.M. Ho, C.T. Chan, and C.M. Soukoulis
1991 (Oct 21) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case Employing Non-Spherical Atoms” –E. Yablonovitch, T.J. Gmitter, and K.M. Leung

I hope it is.

I hope it only sounds like BS, but I am not so sure, and this is very troubling for this OO forum...

Craig Murray in the UK has written extensively about the incarceration and trials of Julian Assange.
About the publication of the unredacted documents see "Julian Assange’s Grand Inquisitor" by Chris Hedges.
But what the WSJ (mainstream media beholden to the Deep State) says as well as the above is irrelevant.  The CIA is in large part a pack of murders – good riddance to bad rubbish.
 
 
 

Commenting on just this part:
If you torture a man for 14 years and he dies a month later, you don’t say he died of natural causes.  Good grief.
What’s under the ellipsis – “the Devil or” – mocks the truth.
 

Video on this page.  (Start viewing at 1:30 because the video begins with an excerpt which you will see later in its place.)  She did a great job, very impressive.
 

If there didn't exist facts relative to deeming the therapy 'safe'( this term has specific meaning when applied to medical interventions and coming from medical experts) there was nothing to investigate. So what facts did you investigate relative to safety?
It seems you just accepted an argument from authority and then reasoned your way to a rationalization, people do that all the time.
Two times in this thread you have asserted that you will not be participating in the discussion and then continue. Is this a good look for a moderator of an O'ist forum? (It feels like lying)