Unconquered
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Posts posted by Unconquered
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The Chinese government hasn't been Communist in about 20 years, and it no longer indiscriminately kills people. It's not a capitalist utopia by any means, but you (I am referring to a number of posters) should do some research before making such broad statements. In various areas, China is now economically freer than the U.S.
Apparently the Chinese haven't been informed of this, viz:
http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/38810.htm
http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/44506.htm
http://www.chinatoday.com/org/cpc/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_China
http://www.bartleby.com/65/co/CommunisChi.html
Re: executions, let's see:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1425570.stm
China executed more people in the last three months than the rest of the world did in the past three years, the human rights group Amnesty International says.In a report published on Friday, the London-based group said China has put people to death not just for violent crimes, but also for offences such as bribery, embezzlement and stealing gasoline.
That was 2001, pretty recent. Since China has literally tens of thousands of censors and the press is completely controlled - one of the hallmarks of a dictatorship identified by Ayn Rand - that does not of course count unreported deaths.
http://www.ecoi.net/pub/dh1850_02005chi.htm
A 2001 New York Times article on the subject.
http://www.justresponse.net/Wang_Zhang.html
Speaking of censorship, this demonstrates the difference in Chinese-government sanitized Google queries on images of Tiananmen Square vs. the U.S. accessible version:
http://www.computerbytesman.com/google/ima...h.htm?tiananmen
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I want to make it clear that I see nothing morally wrong with selling the organs of some criminals after execution, regardless of their religious beliefs. My concern with the Chinese case is that they may already be descending that "slippery slope" in the organ/force market.
This is ridiculously understated. The Chinese government, if anybody has forgotten, is *communist*. *Anybody* for *any reason* could be executed. Expecting justice from such dictators is ludicrous. Selling the organs of the murdered victims of such a government is utterly monstrous and evil.
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Google will manage your mail and provides the storage, so you don't have to worry about the security or reliability of the service.
One thing I would note is that it would not necessarily be a good idea to trust the security of Gmail too much. Google archives practically all data, even "permanently deleted" emails, meaning that anything you ever send or receive from Gmail will forever be subject to future possible hackerish intrusions into their systems, as well as government subpoenas at any point in the future for whatever reason.
See, e.g.: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060317-6406.html. From that article:
Baker is a Gmail user and apparently used Google's "Delete Forever" function in an attempt to get rid of all record of the e-mails. However, in the GMail terms of service, Google says that it may store deleted e-mail in its "offline backup systems" for as long as it desires.
I'm not focusing on the apparent criminality of the person involved, but on Google's stated policy.
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Phil, you are correct, the building did fall slightly at an angle towards its northwest corner - and this was intentional.
Interesting, thanks for the information. I'm glad to hear that it was fully intentional.
It must be a highly competent group of demolitionists. -
I looked at the some of the photo sequences you mentioned and it appears that the building had a noticeable tilt as it was falling in some of the shots, as though it had a significant sideways velocity (tipping over) rather than just collapsing downwards. Did you hear any commentary about that? Presumably the best planned implosion would result in the building strictly falling down and not tipping sideways, which would be a cataclysm.
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I've heard Dr. Brook speak live and even this out of context quote helps me to recall how powerful his arguments are...
Not to mention that the person you quoted is so out of touch with reality that he apparently doesn't realize that Yaron Brook doesn't have a *Brooklyn* accent - he's from Israel.
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If anybody really wants to defend the patent absurdity of the entire universe - not just matter, but space itself - "expanding" from a singularity (no, not just "a few millimeters", which is silly enough, but a literal zero volume), feel free. If you want some excellent context and commentary from an Objectivist scientist (Stephen Speicher) however, I commend you to this thread: http://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?s...indpost&p=15699
But regardless, the essential idea of an "expanding universe" necessarily implies creation ex-nihilo. From, and into, *what*, is the universe expanding?
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Needless to say, the logic of that request needs a bit of fleshing out. For example, if the idea is so absurd that it has never been addressed by any responsible cosmologist, then you won't find any declarations otherwise. Do you have a reference for a credible cosmologist / physicist saying that the Big Bang theory entails creation ex nihilo? Page numbers?
No - simply almost every single thing I've ever heard/read about it.
(There are a few exceptions, such as the notion that our universe is one among an infinitude and just a bubble embedded in some larger super-universe, but this is equally arbitrary.) Consideration of the idea as absurd is from an Objectivist standpoint, which is not exactly common among cosmologists. There are good arguments that black holes, as currently presented as an outgrowth of Einstein's General Relativity, are also absurd because of the central singularity idea which implies a zero volume of the black hole - but you will not find many physicists disputing black holes. (The Big Bang notion also relies on the idea of the entire universe starting from a singularity, i.e. zero volume, and if that isn't "ex nihilo" what is??)
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Unfortunately the idea that "Big Bang" = "creation of something from nothing" seems to be a very common misconception among Objectivists, perhaps due to people not trained in physics learning about cosmology from misleading "pop sci" books.
Every quote from every actual scientist that *I* have ever read or heard indicates that the (philosophically absurd) idea of the "Big Bang" is exactly creation ex-nihilo. Who, and what theory, says otherwise? References please.
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Correction: I took the photo of the building that I put up in 2004 - not 1994. Hmmmmm. It's a pretty bad sign when one no longer knows what decade he is in!
They say memory is the second thing to go ...
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What do people think?
A guy who got drawn to the power of the (illegitimate) office and turned into a full fledged power luster, rationalizing that he was "doing good" - is my take on it. Somebody once said (insightfully) that Greenspan took the job that John Galt turned down.
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That's ridiculous. I certainly hope we get a public outcry about this invasion of privacy.
I don't see any "invasion of privacy" involved. The real issue is whether a forum owner *should* be held responsible for the comments of others. Actually to a degree, they should.
If their forum - which is under their control - sanctions the posting of material which libels somebody, and permits it to be displayed after the content has been pointed out to them, then they are actively abetting an illegal act. Same principle as hosting pirated videos for downloads. Who's going to argue that the only responsible party is the uploader, if the one paying for the hosting is informed of the content and fails to remove it?
Now, it is illogical to say "original poster vs. the forum owner", as this law apparently says. They should *both* be responsible parties, with different responsibilities per the different context.
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Any country that regulates businessmen because they might do something wrong, even though there is no evidence to suggest that they will, can hardly be called Objectivist.
Prohibiting the construction/storage/deployment of potential weapons of mass destruction in a way that protects the right of people to not to be incinerated by a screwup or deliberate malice, would be the proper role of a rational government. To fail to do so would be a default on its responsibility to protect rights. It would be as proper as forbidding somebody from walking around downtown Manhattan while they carry cannisters of chemicals that have some legitimate productive use, but which act as a nerve gas if released. It's an issue of *context*.
The view that "anybody should be able to do anything and own any weapons they want, in any quantity", is a distinctly Libertarian view, often expressed. Do not confuse it with a position compatible with Objectivism. And make no mistake that a nuclear device of the future for ostensibly peaceful uses is still quite the potential weapon.
This is a general principle not restricted to "exotic" technologies. Nobody should, for example, be driving around a dumptruck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the middle of a large city. There aren't any fields to fertilize there and there is no rational purpose for it to be there, but it poses an enormous threat if mixed with some fuel oil and shocked, when it becomes a high explosive. (This is what was used in the Okla. City bomb.)
One more P.S. now that I think about it: My granting the possibility of a future legitimate private use of nuclear devices does not mean that I endorse the idea of "private armies" and other such nonsense. I'm sure they'll be handy to help clear Lunar mountains out of the way.
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Hah, just how do I go about ACTUALLY reading your posts? Am I going to have to drink any alcohol for this?
If none of my interpretations were correct, could you please offer clarification?
None of your "interpretations" were correct. What you responded to, and the insults you made to Dismuke, have no bearing on what he wrote, or on reality. Does that 'clarify' it for you?
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As far as I know, the US military does not manufacture its own “production” nukes, at least not the non-nuclear components. Nuke production is usually done on federal land, but contracted out to private companies.
Well, sure. As far as I know, *absolutely nothing* used by the U.S. military is actually built by the U.S. government. Nominally private companies - acting under very stringent controls by the government (I've worked for such companies, you can bet that they don't do "whatever they want") - actually design and construct these weapons per government requirements. Does anyone think that the contractors building weapons systems for the U.S. government - not just nuclear, but jet engines, advanced electronics, radar, advanced materials, you name it - have a free hand to sell that technology to, say, Iran or North Korea or even nominally U.S. allies? Think twice. You can say they are "private" companies but they are, to a significant degree, under defacto government control, and in this case, I don't think that's a problem.
The Pantex plant in Texas is the sole site for dealing with the assembled nuclear warheads. See:
http://www.pantex.com/ds/pxgeng.htm
From that website: "Pantex Plant is America's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility. Located on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle, 17 miles northeast of Amarillo, Pantex is centered on a 16,000-acre site just north of U. S. Highway 60 in Carson County."
On Google maps, it's here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=...416606,0.651627
the gray area in the middle of the map. It's pretty far away from a small city, Amarillo, and a very long ways from a major population center. They weren't stupid and weren't going to put such a place in the middle of e.g. Los Angeles, which was my point re: a private company doing whatever it wants, wherever it wants.
P.S. I don't mean to imply, on re-reading this, that a future nuke-creating private company *would* be so stupid as to put their production in a major population center, only to stress that the only (basically government controlled) one in existence now *is not* in such a place by design, and it's entirely legitimate, in the future, for there to be explicit restrictions on the construction and use of these immensely powerful devices in order to protect rights, a legitimate government function.
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On top of this, I would add that the current U.S. reactor designs can be made much safer yet again with new ideas that have been developed in the past 40+ years, such as "Pebble Bed" reactors. There are designs that *cannot* go out of control inherently.
That's not even counting the probability that practical fusion reactors are likely to appear within 100 years (hopefully much less), which will obsolete fission and coal and oil for electric power generation.
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I can't think of any reason consistent with Objectivism that would deny businessmen the ability to undertake such ventures.
The issue is the government acting in its role to protect rights. As long as it can be shown that using a nuke isn't going to violate rights, then its use should be ok (given some hypothetical rational future.) But given their immense destructive potential, I think there ought to be a certain legally mandated level of pro-active effort to demonstrate their safe storage and usage by any organization wanting to do so. An H-bomb constructed in the middle of Los Angeles is not a potential violation of rights, it *is* a violation of rights by constituting a reasonable clear and present danger. There is every justification to keep it out, and none to build it there. They could be constructed and stored in secure facilities in a desert, or in space, on an as-needed basis - it isn't like you'd need lots of these things at once.
I would also say that until there's a big change in the world, no private organization should be permitted to construct and own nuclear devices. There's too big of a threat that they could be acquired and deployed by terrorists or terrorist countries.
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I haven't look at this game but it sounds a lot like Outpost. Is there a connection?
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Since then, violent protests have taken place in ten countries, resulting in attacks on five embassies, thirty-four deaths, and hundreds of injuries over a span of three weeks. Many Western media outlets have refused to show the cartoons, citing concerns that they are offensive. But an editorial in the Boston Phoenix explained its refusal by saying, "we are being terrorized, and...could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history."
This is a newspaper in America, a nation organized upon the principle of freedom of speech.
There's a definite issue of courage involved on the newspaper's part - on the other hand, they make a valid point that should not be dismissed entirely, and I think this is something being overlooked by most Objectivists.
If these barbaric scum are using force and violence anywhere in the world - and they are, to whatever degree they can get away with - then fear of violent retribution is legitimate on a newspaper's part. Is this entirely their problem? I don't think so. What this indicates is the massive default on the part of the agency tasked with dealing with threats of force - the government.
The only reason the scum represent a threat is because the U.S., and other Western, governments have had a completely inadequate response to the known home bases of the terrorists - Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. Would *you* put your name and address on a reprinting of these cartoons if you had reason to think that uncontrolled terrorists would go out of their way to look you up?
A threat to freedom of speech - and the broader issue, the threat to all freedoms and the very existence of the U.S. - is exactly a problem in the domain of a government more interested in controlling its own citizens than dealing with the threat at its source.
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This thread is very ironic, since I just watched Grizzly Man (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427312/) last night - a documentary about a guy who lived among bears for some years, with plenty of nauseating video of himself cooing to the bears in the most anthropomorphic way imaginable. He (and his then girlfriend) were finally attacked and devoured by a hungry Grizzly bear. If you really want an up-close and personal view into the psychology and behavior of an ardent environmentalist wacko, it's a perfect documentary.
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Breaking encryption on the internet to gain information is not a violation of rights. The internet is widely understood as mutually interconnected so there is no guarantee of the safety of anything traveling over it.
"Breaking into your house to gain information is not a violation of rights. All houses are widely understood to be mutually interconnected by a network of public roads so there is no guarantee of the safety of anything traveling over it, including burglars who wish to break your locks and forcibly enter your home."
Another analogy would be: Most roads are public roads, therefore you have no expectation that a carjacker won't force you off the road, break in to your car, and steal it.
And yet another analogy: Virtually every phone in the world is interconnected. Therefore it's ok for anybody to tap your phone line and record and disseminate your phone conversations; you shouldn't expect otherwise, and it should be legal to do so.
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No, not at all, unless that information was legally protected (i.e. copyrighted), or constituted aiding and abetting theft (publishing credit card numbers).What right?
If somebody snooped on what was intended to be private communications, even going so far as to hack encryption, it certainly should be illegal. There is certainly no "right" for anybody to get private information that was not publicly offered to them by the person creating the information, who has an implicit ownership of it until they choose to make it public, or it becomes public through their own outright negligence. Hacking encrypted private communications would most certainly be a criminal act of force, no less than breaking into somebody's house and taking pictures of the contents.
To quote from Howard Roark's courtroom speech: ""It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
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How does one get a New Messages deficit? Do I owe someone a new message now? j/k
Haven't you heard? It's the result of the government's new message tax ...
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In conclusion, stop making it seem like Ayn Rand advocated the existence and furtherance of NASA. She didn't. She made the following eloquent tribute to the Apollo program: If America is to die, let's not fuss over NASA, for it has shown us to be a noble beagle call at her funeral. Today NASA consists of a bunch of bungling engineers trying to appease politicians for the most part. So, not only is America's death *not* certain, but NASA today has shown that it isn't even capable of doing what it did in Ayn Rand's time.
For once (I adamently disagree with your opinions on various founding fathers of the U.S.), I have to agree with you. This is a good identification of the way that some people use that article to justify NASA.
Objectivism Research Cd-rom
in Marketplace
Posted
This is Phil Oliver.
I have no intention of wasting time in a prolonged discussion here, but to set the record straight on a few items: first, my CD-ROM has been fully legally licensed and sanctioned for years now. (I sell it, as does ARI via the Ayn Rand Bookstore.) Any suggestions to the contrary are at best ignorant and at worst libelous.
With very few exceptions, the feedback that I've gotten has been strongly positive, and by almost all accounts, the CD-ROM has been of significant benefit to those studying the world's greatest philosophy from history's greatest genius, which was my intention.
Regarding any of my comments on Dr. Peikoff, if anything I say is incorrect, then feel free to correct them - if you actually know them to be incorrect. When I said that he does not value the CD-ROM, that is a statement of fact, to the best of my knowledge (and I know more about it than you.) In fact, I doubt that he would hesitate to even say so if directly asked.
If I have some negative assessment about the man, it's after a slow process of discovery, after years of defending him (and Ayn Rand and ARI) against smears from the likes of Diana Hsieh (whose shrill "reformation" is unconvincing.) My respect for Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and ARI is undiminished. I will, sometime, give the "full story" regarding why I'm not going to pursue renewing licensing for the product, but it will not be here, and it will probably not be soon - but I will say that I am hardly the first person (including a number of individuals associated with ARI) who's been alienated by him.
Dr. Peikoff is highly intelligent and has done some great things, most notably writing OPAR, to his everlasting credit, but I suggest that it's unwise to iconify him, and to beware of those who place personal alliances and agendas over facts and logic.