AlexL

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

Ayn Rand once gave some really good advice that went something like this: "The most important thing you can do to help the poor is to avoid becoming poor yourself." I add: The most important thing you can do to stop destructive evil in the world is to not be destructive of yourself, such as by telling lies, using non-prescribed psychoactive narcotics (even if legal), possibly causing damage to your mind such as paranoia and delusions of Galt-level accomplishments made by yourself, mysteriously unheralded, in physics and engineering. From all you have described to us on your personal front and pleaded for us to accept, it looks most likely that if you "will be completely out of all resources", it will be at root due to your own compromised mind and behavior, whether you yourself caused that damage or it happened by the course of nature. If you die "within the next two weeks" it will not be because of evil of someone else. I hope you will still be alive in two weeks and not so out of resources that you no longer can communicate in this medium if you wish.
A sister of mine committed suicide a few years ago (a wife, mother, and grandmother), and from what I know of her physical miseries for which she could get no further help, it was a well-and-long-considered sensible suicide. I don't think she did it just so her loved ones would be pained. I do not know your health potentials, but that is surely the arena in which you need help and protection, assuming you are not just BS-ing the site in a show of fake feelings and mental states (which I doubt). I hope you are not in such a boxed-in and painful health situation as my sister evidently was. Be suspicious of any inclination you have towards suicide. Nature is going to end each life soon enough.
A year ago, a nephew of mine died of alcoholism. It destroyed his organs. He was 52. It had started as a young man, when he had been in the Navy. He knew he was an addict, but refused to let the appropriate professionals try to help him. I hope you are not on a destructive course along those lines, with some sort of long addiction. If so, please get medical help, and realize you can not make the return to health by yourself.
I experienced paranoia myself for a couple of days. I was in a safe place, a hospital I'd come to for what turned out to be symptoms from a bladder blockage. All my regular medicines I take each day to stay alive could not get released from my body and caused malfunctions in my brain. The neurological condition is known as Metabolic Encephalopathy. When I later saw my neurologist, he could predict all the various mental malfunctions that had ensued. I mention the paranoia part because I know first-hand that while you are in it, you do not know you are in it. You just keep putting every bit in every episode of life into a vast plot against yourself and things you treasure. But if there is for you periodic waning of it, get yourself some help, protecting yourself from yourself.
Don't be ashamed of mental derailments. The appropriate model of human perfection is not a perfect crystal, but perfect health, which can be lost and possibly regained. Resilience and recoveries are virtues. I was in a mental hospital myself as a young man, due to my suicidal responses to my existential situation. I began to read The Fountainhead there, and my doctor encouraged me to finish it, which I did. And I lived another six decades (so far, so good) without such problems again, and I achieved difficult things in love and work and in personal projects that, though difficult, were more modest than and more suited to my abilities than stellar physics breakthroughs. (I loved physics and, with engineering education also, I have been able to put what I learned to good use in philosophical reflections.) And I have been happy.
Here's hoping.
–S

A Greek Sham
The fire of the gods stolen by Prometheus was actually stolen by the story maker from man and given to the gods, omitting credit to man of having learned to start, control, and use fires without outside help.

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...

They aren’t Objectivists, nor are they conservatives. They are both brilliant, two of my favorite modern day intellectuals. They are fact driven, rational, insightful, courageous and morally upright. The more I live the more I appreciate how great they really are. Leftists don't seem to produce those kinds of people.

You are free to create such a forum, but you cannot expect that a given forum owner, for example of this one, will tolerate on his premises the broadcasting of views he abhors. Or tolerate irrational behavior in a debate, for example when a person refuses to justify his claims, the concept of evidence-based debate etc.
This requirement will stop nothing: any idea may be found to have something to do with Objectivism😁
Not sure what you mean... In any case: force is not the only form of harm.

A forum is a space for discussions/debates. What you are describing is an unmoderated forum (= zero control over content). The owner defines what, who and how. It is not "pretty much true by definition" that a forum is unmoderated.
My understanding is that @Boydstun described various choices as to how to moderate a forum, not choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. One does not have an a priori freedom of speech on a private forum. It is implicit in the attributes of private property. The non-owners are guest and are subjected to the rules of the house.
Harmed is that owner who does not want his property to be used in ways he does not desire, for example to spread ideas he hates.

A forum is a space for discussions/debates. What you are describing is an unmoderated forum (= zero control over content). The owner defines what, who and how. It is not "pretty much true by definition" that a forum is unmoderated.
My understanding is that @Boydstun described various choices as to how to moderate a forum, not choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. One does not have an a priori freedom of speech on a private forum. It is implicit in the attributes of private property. The non-owners are guest and are subjected to the rules of the house.
Harmed is that owner who does not want his property to be used in ways he does not desire, for example to spread ideas he hates.

If you exercise editorial control, it ceases to be a "forum" at all, and becomes a "magazine" or a "journal." That's my point.
If I write a book I can control everything in the book. But it's not literally a "forum." It's a book.
(My biggest concern is that no one would read it, which is one reason why I like having access to open forums.)
(Maybe this is more like a continuum than an either-or thing.)
I can't find the exact quote, but I believe Rand said somewhere (perhaps in "What Can One Do?") that as long as free speech exists, the right ideas have a chance.
I will agree with @Boydstun that there are a lot of choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. But the thing about a forum is precisely that it does not constitute an exercise of one's own speech -- it constitutes giving others an opportunity to speak, which is a different thing (and can be valuable too, including to the giver of the opportunity).
Of course when you provide that opportunity it's pretty much true by definition that you give up control over what those others are going to say. You are signing up for surprises. Some of them may be pleasant, some not. The pleasant ones are what make it worthwhile.
(But also, a person may run or participate in an open forum because he wants to test his own thinking and ideas by being exposed to those of others.)
Peikoff writes that lies are "impotent" because the underlying reality is still there and will be discovered. This is why people who live by lies end up having to resort to force (because the lies alone are never enough). It's also why a free society can afford to have free speech. So in that sense there shouldn't be any harm in allowing people to speak their minds. (I'm excluding stuff like harassment that would render the forum useless). The truth will come out eventually.
Even posting the truth here isn't necessarily going to end the discussion, though, because people have to see that truth for themselves, and they have to see it in reality, not just in the forum. Discussions end when there is nothing more to add.
My concern is that the calls to exercise more editorial control are actually rooted in the idea that lies are not impotent, that lies have to be censored because they'll "mislead" people.
This is rooted in the primacy of consciousness, but not in the usual way: most people familiar with Objectivism know better than to think that lies "create reality." We all know that I can lie and say I have a gold bar, but the lie doesn't create the gold bar.
But there is a "second order" version of the "primacy of consciousness," if you want to call it that -- the notion that if false ideas spread around, people will believe them, and then act on them, and then this will give rise to oppressive governments and cultures. So well-meaning people then conclude that the spread of the false ideas has to be stopped.
False ideas need to be refuted; that's the only way to really stop them.
The possibility that people will believe bad ideas called "free will" and is metaphysically given, and there's nothing we can actually do about that. We can try to put the right ideas out there, and also try to explain why the wrong ideas are wrong.
Trying to fight the metaphysically given is why it's a second-order version of the primacy of consciousness. We can't stop people from thinking bad thoughts. If refutation is not enough then the human species is doomed anyway.
I think that setting up forum rules to ban the discussion of certain ideas only serves to create the impression that Objectivism cannot withstand those ideas, which is not true. Further, the ideas are not "gone," they just go to other forums. Merely hiding the arguments we disagree with doesn't help; it can even amount to self-deception.
I will admit that sometimes people raise the same tired old objections to Objectivism over and over. In that case it should be sufficient to refer to them to places where the objections have already been answered. However, it is possible that the answer to the tired old objection was somehow incomplete and so another question may need to be answered.
There are also people out there who would expect you to "prove" that 2 + 2 = 4, and they won't accept anything you say, so that they are either trolling or their reasoning is irreparably defective. In that case, just stop. There is nothing you can do. (Why get all upset about it?)
The correct thing to do, the only thing we really can do, about the evil in society, is try to patiently explain why having an oppressive culture is a bad idea, and how to make a better one -- which is sort of what Objectivism is about in the first place.
--
There is a second concern, too. The forum owners may say that they don't want their resources to be used to promote bad ideas.
The thing is, when the forum is open, and somebody posts a bad idea, it doesn't count as a "promotion" in the same way it would if it had been approved by editors. This is because people know that the forum is open and that just about anything can be posted.
If everybody wins an award, the award is not very meaningful, and that's an instance of the same principle.

Yours is only ONE conception of what a forum must be or should be. There is nothing in the technology requiring that model, and any conventions about it were born yesterday and should anyway be rattled with experimentation. Over at Objectivist Living, the owner openly restricted content to: do not criticize Nathaniel or Barbara Branden. In the later years, he had the covert content restriction: do not criticize Donald Trump. It's still a forum. The highly content-restricted forums (FB Groups) named "Ayn Rand Group" and "Leonard Peikoff Appreciation Group" are still forums. An electronic forum could have all the topic-restrictions and scholarly-level requirements I put on the Objectivity journal and it could have management such as the absolute monarchy as I did it there, and it would still be a forum. And it might be a useful forum for some writers and readers because of those considerable restrictions on content. 
The Comments section of online magazines are also forums. In the case of Philosophy Now, the owners have adopted a sufficiently hands-off policy that anything favorable to Ayn Rand or even accurately representing Rand will be met with vicious personal attack on the commenter as ignorant and idiot. The management allows that routine dynamic, and they evidently get the participants and product suited to their project.

To me that thread seemed to boil down to a flat earth type of thread where any rational argument or evidence was denied while looking for specific "evidence" from a conspiracy theorist even though it exists in countless forms.  Again, explicitly name the exact reason honestly for the thread. 

You @EC unexpectedly closed the thread "Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny" and did not provide a reason. 
I was waiting for an important answer from @monart...
Some more transparency would be welcomed...

Yes, and these corrupt "people at the top", known or unknown, wield their power and influence such that, in this case of the covid tyranny, the majority of the medical profession just believe and follow their leaders, do their jobs, keep their eyes and heads down, so as to keep or advance in their positions -- while others who do speak up are dismissed or punished as purveyors of disinformation, "conspiricists", or "covid deniers".

A. The implication of your wording above is that "official, authorized(??), mainstream narrative" is mostly wrong, which in itself is a conspiracist claim😁
B. Yes, the labeling "conspiracist can be used to intimidate etc., but the fact that it is used does not necessarily imply intimidation: it can be a true factual statement. In our case:
1. You approvingly cite Christine Massey, a quack and a conspiracist: consider her YogaEsoteric [sic!] and FluorideFreePee [sic!] sites, her unscientific, ridiculous "No Records Found" research and her general denial of the existence of viruses;
2. You (and C. Massey) approvingly and with no caveats refer to the book Virus Mania as an authoritative source, although the title itself is very telling:
Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio - How the Medical Industry Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense
The respective viruses allegedly do not exist, the bad and greedy medical industry invented them, and epidemics, for enormous profits at our expense. It is obviously a conspiracy; it had to start at lest 120 years ago (Poliovirus, 1909) and had to involve, since, dozen or hundreds of millions of medical professionals spreading this alleged fiction.
It is a shame to refer to that person and to the book approvingly and with no caveats - on this Objectivism forum.

A. The implication of your wording above is that "official, authorized(??), mainstream narrative" is mostly wrong, which in itself is a conspiracist claim😁
B. Yes, the labeling "conspiracist can be used to intimidate etc., but the fact that it is used does not necessarily imply intimidation: it can be a true factual statement. In our case:
1. You approvingly cite Christine Massey, a quack and a conspiracist: consider her YogaEsoteric [sic!] and FluorideFreePee [sic!] sites, her unscientific, ridiculous "No Records Found" research and her general denial of the existence of viruses;
2. You (and C. Massey) approvingly and with no caveats refer to the book Virus Mania as an authoritative source, although the title itself is very telling:
Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio - How the Medical Industry Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense
The respective viruses allegedly do not exist, the bad and greedy medical industry invented them, and epidemics, for enormous profits at our expense. It is obviously a conspiracy; it had to start at lest 120 years ago (Poliovirus, 1909) and had to involve, since, dozen or hundreds of millions of medical professionals spreading this alleged fiction.
It is a shame to refer to that person and to the book approvingly and with no caveats - on this Objectivism forum.

No, that would be secondhanded, I did it to prevent myself from getting Covid and studied mRNA vaccines before taking the vaccines. This is ridiculous and I'm not taking part in this strange discussion anymore and will read to moderate it against arbitrary conspiracy theories and from those seeking to ignore reason,  evidence, and proper epistemology. 

It does follow.
If you tell me: "do <<this>> for me and I will give you 1.5 millions" then, if I don't know you, the first thing I will do is ask you to show me that you do have such kind of money.
If you refuse to provide evidence that you have the money, then I will  - rightly - conclude, on this basis alone, that your offer is bogus.
There is no symmetry between you and me in the above arrangement, so that there is no need to consider "the flip side".

No, it doesn't follow that it's a bogus award, just because Mr. Eckert wants proof of virus isolation from Dr. Kammerer first, while Dr. Kammerer want proof of the award first.  Consider the flip side, since Dr. Kammerer doesn’t want to show her proof first, does it follow from that alone that she doesn’t have it?  No.

In an article reporting Dr. Kammerer's side of the dispute:
"In a letter from a lawyer dated October 17, 2022, the law firm Rogert & Ulbrich informed SaMiraFamily AG and Mr. Samuel Eckert that Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer complied with the request and will present proof of the existence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus with proof of the existence of the amount of the request."
In an article reporting Mr. Eckert's side of the debate:
"In view of the expressed "suspicion of fraud", the accusation of "cheating" and the fact that Kämmerer announced more than once to the public that she had the evidence necessary to fulfill the promise, but she did not want to "give it away" and obviously still doesn't want to, Transition News sent her and her lawyers several questions."
So, it's at least a stand-off: each side wanting the other to provide the proof first.
But the fundamental question remains. If the proof exists that SC2 has been isolated, purified, and distinctly identified, and that this proof is so widely available that asking for it is absurd, then where are the documents for it? If the proof is so obvious and publicly available as to be unquestionable and unchallengeable, then why does Dr. Kammerer not want to "give it away"?
Is it like someone claiming they have proof that Objectivism is false, but doesn't want to "give it away"?
 
 

Yes, indeed,  it would be an easy award to win if SARS-CoV-2 has already been isolated. You suggest that, as nobody took up the challenge, SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated.
If you have given it a serious look, you would have seen that the offer is not quite serious:
From the site and the video linked to, I saw that the person who initiated the challenge and offers the reward is a certain Mr. Samuel Eckert.
On October 17, 2022, Fr. Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg contacted this Samuel Eckert through her lawyers. She accepts the challenge. She will provide the required proof. For the fact that she, as you requested, is indeed a virologist, she sent attached her publications.
She then asked Mr. Eckert to prove that he does possess the amount of the award, e.g. by depositing it in an escrow account.
Now this Mr. Eckert answers something like: wait a minute, the objective of this challenge is not to pay 1.5 million, but to open a debate etc. !
In another video (this one, minute 15:43), Mr. Eckert explains that first should Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer provide the required proof for existence of SARS-CoV-2, and only then will Mr. Eckert prove that he has the money ! A bogus award, in other words.
It would have been better if, before suggesting that nobody accepted the challenge and implying that this is an additional indication that  SARS-CoV-2 doesn't exist, you would have given this challenge a serious look.☹️
His site indicates that this Mr. Eckert is a conspiracy theorist (no viruses exist etc.).
This is not the first conspiracist you are approvingly citing on this Objectivism forum: it was also Christine Massey (from YogaEsoteric and FluorideFreePeel), then the book Virus Mania: Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio. How the Medical Industry Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense.☹️☹️

Interesting.
But have you checked what happened after the challenge was proposed?  Did anyone accept the challenge?
I would be cautious about a 1.5 million award: is it a honest offer, not a bogus one? Does the person/organization have this kind of money? Who will evaluate the scientific proof? Etc.
IOW: have you establish the seriousness of this award offer?

As I mentioned at least twice above, “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” provides the proof that you have demanded, which incidentally is an unreasonable demand (evidence is evidence, you don’t get to arbitrarily stipulate what constitutes evidence). You have not addressed the facts, instead you retreat behind automatic denial as a means of evading the science. In the face of evidence having been presented, it is incumbent on you to disprove that evidence. Indeed, I have no evidence that you have even looked at that article, and I can think of no rational reason for your refusal to directly address the science. You offer no alternative conclusion regarding the axiomatic (the myriad scientific observations of covid), instead you just repeat your denial without evidence to support an alternative, nor do you even state what such an alternative is. In other words, you are engaging in selective epistemological nihilism.
My current counter-offer is that you should provide evidence that malaria exists: I will take the position that you have taken, which is to just deny that malaria exists. I sincerely hope that you do not hold a political-consequences theory of epistemology, that the standards of proof depends not on the logic of the claim and the objective nature of the existent, but are determined by whether the existent has been misused to support initiation of force. Under which logic, I substitute measles, smallpox or Spanish flu in my challenge to you, all of which triggered tyrannical governmental responses. I would like to see what you consider to be acceptable proof that malaria exists, and see some reasoning as to why you find that evidence to be sufficient (unless, of course, you are also a malaria-denier).

Again, no documentation has been found or offered, verifying that SAR-CoV-2 has been isolated, purified, and distinctly identified as a new existent, and, furthermore, that it cause Covid-19. Ignoring this fact may lead one to the distraction of comparing "having covid" to having appendicitis or malaria. No tyranny has ever been imposed because of appendicitis or malaria, or the common cold.

The same question can be asked about the common cold, appendicitis or malaria. Do you know by your own reason that these things exist, or do you merely rely on the expertise of others who say that they exist? I have personal sensory experience with the common cold and appendicitis, and not malaria. I now know that Turkey exists, though I do not know directly that Iraq exists, however, I have friends (whom I trust, perhaps unreasonably so) that can attest to the existence of Iraq.
There is a simple formula that can be followed to deny all knowledge: just deny something. If you claim “I personally had covid”, the counter-claim would be “How do you know it was covid that you had, not something else?”. Indeed, Peikoff discusses the procedure in his explication of reason and certainty – to be certain, you must not just have evidence for a proposition, you must eliminate all evidence, even conceptual evidence, for alternatives. You could say “Possibly I had covid” or “Possibly I had appendicitis”, but how can you rule out all of the alternatives. It is always possible to say “It might be something else”.
The key to not devolving into epistemological nihilism is to reject unsupported denial as a logical tool. To deny that an individual has appendicitis or the common cold, you must offer superior evidence that they have a specific alternative. My initial hypothesis regarding covid was that I had strep throat. I refuted that in two ways. First, the probative throat pustules of strep were lacking. Second, the antigen test was positive. My knowledge of what I had was not complete, for example I do not know which of 5 variants I was infested with, and certainly not which of the thousands of sub-mutations. The broader lesson is that you don’t deny knowledge just because you are not omniscient.
If you intend to discount the testimony of scientific experts, you have to have superior evidence that they are not to be trusted. In fact, scientific experts collectively provide the essential evidence against themselves. I always urge people to directly engage the peer-reviewed literature as best they can, though I can’t make heads of tails of physics publications. An article will (should) contain the seeds of its own destruction, identifying weaknesses and alternative accounts, because the reviewers demanded that those seeds be planted.
Unfortunately, most popular knowledge of science is transmitted in untrustworthy venues. I don’t know whether Science is trustworthy in other areas, but I can tell you that it is completely untrustworthy in the area of linguistics, where it occasionally publishes an ill-researched article. Blogs are plainly untrustworthy. So, a crucial skill in evaluating scientific claims is being able to evaluate the credibility of a journal, which is a very difficult task.
Belief in climate change is a major problem, because it's a very specific package deal which is partially related to something else that the senses directly validate – weather change. "Climate change" is an ill-defined assertion that cannot even be spelled out as a concrete scientific hypothesis. Covid, on the other hand, is a specific, testable, and tested scientific claim.
 

I appreciate and am grateful that, in response to this challenge, each one of you have given it attention and posted your replies. I have learned and am encouraged that there are Objectivists here who are curious and caring about the truth of covid. My will was good, and I've received goodwill in return.