Jon Letendre

Gus Van Horn's comment is about pros and cons of back-up-to-park. It does not follow from it that Gus "cannot drive a car".
Changing the subject to Ayn Rand is sneaky.
Your comment:
is not morally neutral.
I did not draw board moderator and owner's attention over the comment you are citing ("Someday, in a month or so [...]"). It was over a different comment.

Oh, your initial comment - about "Ayn Rand couldn't drive a car" - was in fact about ME not being able to drive a car! OK.😁

I am challenging the relevance of your post for the topics' subject.
But maybe you simply don't know what the hint at "lynching Negroes" means? Then read this.

Snatches of two bits of political commentary pretty well encapsulate my assessment of the "landslide" outcome in the GOP's Iowa caucuses the other day.

First, Iowa hasn't exactly been predictive lately:Caucuses aren't polls of the general public, and whoever it is -- strong partisans, I presume -- who participate in the Iowa caucuses have been out of touch in the theocratic/social conservative direction lately.

Trump is the man for that anti-freedom lot in this election.

Second: 51%.

That's all?

I agree with Phil Boas, who argues in USA Today that this result is a weak showing, because Trump is, for all practical purposes, running as an incumbent. (And that would be true despite polling showing that 65% (!) of the caucus participants there are brain-dead enough to believe Trump actually won the 2020 election.) Boas notes a big incentive for independents who want a choice other than Trump or Biden to vote in New Hampshire's Republican primary at a time when polling shows Haley smoking Biden by 17% in a head-to-head matchup.

Overall, while it was disappointing to see Trump run away with Iowa, his winning there was predictable. But his margin there -- under ideal conditions for him -- wasn't the catastrophe Democrats and Trump supporters were hoping for, albeit for different, co-dependent reasons.

New Hampshire will give a better picture of whether Nikki Haley can topple Donald Trump.

-- CAV

P.S. One bit of good news out of the caucuses: DeSantis, who has come to represent a more competent (and therefore dangerous) version of everything bad about Donald Trump, may have fatally wounded his future political aspirations:This is the direction a significant part of the conservative movement has been headed for some time, and unless we get a "more competent DeSantis" in the near future, the Iowa caucuses may well have bought some time to fight for freedom.Link to Original

With some context:
"their intellectual betters" means also poor, also whites, but who are hardworking and less frequently racist.
Ayn Rand's detractors love taking her words out of context, while knowing that in her writings every word is important.

He won 98 or 99 of Iowa's 99 counties! Not a bad showing.
No doubt but that with a few more indictments he could have won 100 out of 99.
Maybe they will come through for us with yet more indictments. More Directives 10-28NeverTrump, please!!

I have not gone too far.
Genocide is defined as:
"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such :
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Source:
The UN resolution in 1948 that defined the crime of Genocide: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume 78/volume-78-I-1021-English.pdf
That Israel is guilty of at least (a), (b), and (c) is beyond question at this point. The difficult part in cases such as this is proving intent. Thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu, this is now easy.
In a recent speech, Netanyahu said "You must remember what Amalek has done to you," quoting the Bible. For those that don't know, the full quote is
 
Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/
Netanyahu is neither unusual for an Israeli politician and government official, nor as this even new for him. There is a long-standing pattern of genocidal rhetoric within the Israeli government:
Source: https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2016/10/Background on the term genocide in Israel Palestine Context.pdf

What is the point of helping a nation that does not require any help? 
Based on what you have said there is no reason for the US to help Israel. You've made a strong case for that.
Are you also going to make the case that Israel does not have a strong lobby in the US?

Go to war with Iran, while financing the war in Ukraine. Of course, we should also eradicate North Korea while we are at it. Get rid of all of the evil in the world. As if all of this is free and without any regretful consequence. 
The potential for World War Three is being ignored. 1400 innocent Israelis have been killed, but part of it is due to Israeli negligence which one could argue: is still going on. The future animosity being created is not to the advantage of Israel. Relations with Israel and Arab countries were being normalized. Not anymore with the kind of massive killing that is going on in Gaza.
We have fought the Taliban, trying to eradicate them with a giant coalition, Afghanistan is a far more backward country than Iran and now, after 20 years of fighting them and 2 trillion dollars spent, we are supporting the Taliban government's existence. Has the experience in Vietnam been already forgotten? That's an example of what the "eradication mindset" gets you. Hamas is staying in some form or another because they are the only Palestinian voice that Israel has heard and reacted to. It may or may not be dominant moving forward but it won't go away as long as they need to have a resistance movement. With all the revenge policy at work, the only solution is to better the lives of the Palestinians. It is a very bitter medicine but it is the only one that will work. Subjugation or ethnic cleansing won't work in this day and age.
Getting rid of Iran is not as simple as you seem to think or it would have been done by now.
Iran has 80 million people and most of the population can read and write because it is compulsory. Recall how they caused oil prices to spike with one cruise missile into Saudi Arabian oil fields. Their drone technology is advanced enough that they supply Russia with its war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, do you think that Russia and China will just watch their financial interests in Iran disappear without putting up some resistance?
 

She's also directly promoting evil ideas on this forum outside of the debate forum which is a direct violation of forum rules.

I mean the leaning towards classical mechanics over advanced modern physics of most Objectivists is all.
And, as to the second point, all I'm saying is that I individually arrived at all the same conclusions on all of these concrete issues and fully agree with them, not was somehow influenced by them "uncritically" after the fact. All I'm saying is that the articles and source materials are professionally written and edited for publication while presenting the same information and ideas in a better format than spur-of-the-moment off-hand remarks written quickly on a phone, etc.
Discussion is fine obviously as long as it's centered around Objectivist principles, and people are asking intelligent honest questions about issues in the context of appropriate Objectivist replies and not implicitly nor explicitly promoting anti-Objectivist ideas of any type. "Debates" with those of non-Objectivist views are supposed to be limited only to the moderated "Debate Forum" and require strict moderation as per the rules of this site when GC created it and developed the forum rules over time.
That said, I'm not here to debate you either nor justify myself to you, so move on. I just find it extremely insulting that you would believe that Objectivists in the context of an Objectivist forum would either hold non-Objectivist views or somehow arrived at the same conclusions as the professional New Intellectuals, and in some manner didn't arrive at the same conclusions independently via the application of principles and ideas via the usage of reason instead of some sort of "parroting" that you are irrationally implying without reason nor evidence.

I don’t recall any Objectivist treatises on physics, do you mean interpretations of quantum physics published by self identified ‘Objectivists’?
And by the same token do you mean you take your standards of foreign policy from Rand’s interpretation of specific events or accept statements of standards from self identified O’ist uncritically, especially as they delineate specific events?
Perhaps O’ist forums are not places for discussion , debate , just a search space for the ‘correct’ positions?

You are thus refuting your own unqualified claim that "the tunnel network is a defensive utility for the terrorists"

I am still waiting for your coment on this. You should better be aware that the matter is serious.

Then tell me what do you find unclear in what I wrote. Here is it again:

It used to be the case that America was run by a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite.  It isn't anymore.  Those who are the elite consider themselves a people apart.  This link still works https://archive.is/5yeSC 

No, this guy is what passes for establishment today.  From https://cis.org/Steinlight
 
 

Not collectivist. In - “I really don’t care about this conflict” because I have no dog in the fight, or words to that effect - I read simply that it doesn’t involve him, doesn’t involve his interests. It may as well be a battle between good and evil a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. “But which side is good and which is evil, you gotta decide!!” No, we don’t have to. We don’t have to be interested or care at all. There are too many conflicts today and it would take too much time. Not collectivist. Focused on what affects us.

Is this for me? If it is, then first cool down. Then explain, calmly, your objection to my comments.

Ukraine will never get another dime from the American congress now that the new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is so adamantly against it.   Ukraine cannot continue without American funding.  Ukraine will require time to accept the inevitable, and Russia will now press its advantage and no longer feels pressure to negotiate.  Therefore much territory will change hands on the ground over the next few months as Ukraine runs out of ammunition, men and money for salaries and Swiss bank accounts.

Probably correct.  The situation will progress until the Ukrainian government is no longer required to think, merely comply.

Posting to subscribe to the thread.   I really don't care about this conflict because I am neither jewish nor muslim.  I would just like to remind everyone of the big picture: modern Isreal exists because of the ideology of Zionism and jewish supremacism embedded within it.  If Zionism is invalid then anything which is a consequence of Zionism is invalid.

There is a bit of a border with Egypt, but it is largely Israeli control But what you're saying here is even worse, because this is after the destruction of Hamas. I'm saying those kind of responses in the aftermath are bad, they produce more problems, and they are methods that stand against liberty. You should understand that my point is that Israel does not take consistent principled stands in favor of liberty, all it seems have ever done is respond to direct attacks but then completely fail to do anything to stop that from happening again. 
I guess he feels bad that he didn't rise up against the South African government back during apartheid. 

Take your identity politics elsewhere. You know less than nothing about me.
But - but - its says "South Africa"! And he has a whitey name!
"We know the type..."
That is the most blatant anti-individualism I've seen on an Oist forum. .

@whYNOT is a symptom of disgusting White people who have lived a privileged life, think oppression has no consequences, live in their own Aryan/Übermensch fantasies and think that Jews should have "pulled themselves by their bootstraps" in the middle of the Holocaust and should have simply "chosen not to be victims".