Thomas M. Miovas Jr.

I'm not in agreement with the idea that all of Japanese decent ought to have been rounded up and thrown into camps during WWII. It was an over-reaction, and in part, came from the inability to confront the Imperialist Japanese / Shintoists on ideological grounds. Likewise, because Bush originated the idea that we have to be nice to Muslims even though Muslims attacked us and to state that "Islam means peace" when it clearly doesn't (just look at any Muslim country and their history of conflict with non-Muslims), then taking the proper course of action against specific Muslims becomes problematic. No, we cannot "round them all up" but no one has been saying that. We are talking about preventing the building of a structure that would be dedicated to Islamicism and the eventual take-over of America via Sharia Law. Ordinarily, no, the US government could not stop an ideology per se, but I would not have been against curtailing Naziism or Shintoism during WWII; and I'm not against curtailing Islamicism (Islam in its political form) during the badly identified "War on Terror." One has to be able to think long-range and in terms of fundamentals to see that Islam is a philosophy in action out to destroy the United States, and it would be proper to prevent that until they are so beaten back to the Stone Age that they never lift a finger against us again.

I'm not going to be engaging with 9th doc any longer after his insults to me presented in the form of sound bites. So do not think that I agree with him if I do not reply to his stuff.

Right...if I haven't listened to Brandon, then I can't possibly know if OPAR is a masterful integration or not. Where do you come up with this stuff? And, no, I am not talking about non-consensual sex. I'm talking about the man initiating the sexual act, such as foreplay or cuddling in the appropriate context, like a date specifically engaged in to have sex with a woman one loves. As LP pointed out in his retraction podcast, one cannot say that it is rape if the man did not get specific written permission beforehand. Of course, the woman can say NO, I don't want to go any further, and the man would have to back off; but this doesn't mean that the man cannot initiate the physical contact without direct permission. I think that Straw Man presented earlier must have been to your replies.

First of all, it wouldn't be pre-emptive, since they attacked us first (various terrorist attacks including 911); second of all, to do it legally would require a full declaration of war against an Islamic country similar to the declaration of war against Germany and Japan during WWII. In lieu of that type of principled declaration, I don't think we can stop the spread of Islam nor stop the building of the NYC Mosque. However, by rational principles, if someone declares war on you, then yes, you can stop them in their tracks (ban any new mosques) until after they surrender and vow to never attack us again.

We had a long and involved discussion of the NYC Mosque and the principles surrounding it in this thread (now closed), so I am not going to go into a great deal of details regarding defending LP's position. I think it is quite clear, given the facts of the case and leading up to 911, that the USA was attacked by Muslims who were acting fully and consistently with Islam and that it was an ideological stance on their part. Those who are against the prevention of the NYC Mosque do not see the battle in philosophical terms -- they tend to see it as several religious nut cases flying airplanes into buildings with no greater meaning to the acts of destruction. However, if one takes ideas seriously and realizes that the "Death to America!" slogans espoused by Iran and other Islamic nations do represent their actual philosophy and that they *mean* it -- that destroying America is a moral ideal in their philosophy -- then, yes, one has not only the moral right to prevent them from building a monument to their wanton destruction, but a moral obligation based on reason to prevent them from becoming established in this country (at least so long as the war is going on). And that they ought to be utterly destroyed insofar as they seek to establish a country or an empire based upon that ideology.

Just a brief reply to someone who was wondering where I was during the "date rape" hoopla and why I didn't participate in rebuttals to LP on oo.net. The simple answer is that I did not think he was advocating date rape to begin with. I did say on Amy Peikoff's forum that I would back out if a woman changed her mind because I don't care to be accused of rape, but I was neither for LP or against LP at that point. I did agree with LP that it was a moral issue; that once a woman says Yes then she ought to follow through with it. However, my comments about his retraction were that not only did he clarify his position, but he went into a whole mini lecture on what was and what was not rape -- i.e. there are those who claim that a woman ought to give or not give specific permissions to, say, touch her left breast, and if she doesn't give explicit permission, then it is date rape; which is ridiculous. That was what I was referring to when I said that he blasted his critics even in his retraction. And as I pointed out either in Amy's forum or on FaceBook, it is not as if the man wants to cut off the woman's arm and needs explicit permission to do so -- no, he wants to do something that is pleasurable to both parties, but the feminists and the "permissions first crowd" act as if the man is trying to do harm to the woman by making advances she may not have explicitly given permission to do.

Reposting this from a FaceBook Note I wrote: Having Respect for Ayn Rand and Dr. Peikoff by Thomas M Miovas Jr on Sunday, March 18, 2012 at 9:13am · To some of my critics regarding respect for Dr. Peikoff and Ayn Rand: Now, look, it is not an issue of "idolatry" regarding how one ought to deal with Ayn Rand and Dr. Peikoff; it's an issue of realizing the incredible accomplishment that both achieved with their presentation of Objectivism, the most rational philosophy ever conceived of by man. Maybe I am in somewhat of a unique position on this forum, as I have a degree in physics and philosophy and have studied the history of the world in the context of Western Civilization as I was getting those degrees via my university's core curriculum program. I definitely disagree with their premises, since it was a Catholic university, but it gave me the opportunity to get the facts whereby I could draw my own conclusions about the influence of philosophy on world history. And in that context, Objectivism is the greatest thing that ever happened to mankind and can save civilization from another Dark Ages. With that in mind, and given his book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, morally requires one to take notice if one takes one's own life and reason as the standards. It is an issue of applied justice to treat LP with a great deal of respect, even if one disagrees with him on a particular topic. It doesn't mean don't voice your disagreement, but it does mean that if you disagree with him that you ought to present your side in terms of the relevant facts integrated in a logical manner -- to use the method of objectivity. To not do that, to not follow that method, is to say that you do not take facts and reason seriously; and, of course, this also implies that you will not respect anyone who is rational. To be consistent with reason and Objectivism means that one has to take note when someone has achieved a great achievement like Objectivism and OPAR. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/justice.html http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/objectivity/1.html

Yes, I was doing funky math because of the way I hold Sept 11, 2001 in my mind as 911, which got transposed to 9/11 (Sept 2011). At any rate, you are correct that End States came out after 911, though Dr. Peikoff and other leading Objectivists were against the police policies of handling Islamic terrorism well before 911 and were advocating having a war against Iran and other States who were advocating attacking the West in the name of Islam. In fact, they thought we should have had a war with Iran after the Embassy hostage situation (I think in 1979).

Actually, you are right about the publication date of End States Who Sponsor Terrorism (Tuesday, October 2, 2001), so my apologies about the mistake. However, he had been advocating the same response to world-wide terrorism decades before 911, when our government began dealing with terrorist acts on a case by case basis as if they were just requiring some sort of police action and not an all-out war against the Islamicists. As to DR.Peikoff not knowing what he is talking about Re transgenderism and NYC Mosque, he has answered those issues in spades during podcasts; right to life coming before property rights and man's metaphysical nature coming before making major changes to the body that cannot be physically integrated by man at this point.

Applications of Philosophy Objectivism in one’s daily life By Thomas M. Miovas, Jr. 04/27/2012 There is a disturbing trend among the younger generation of those interested in Objectivism, and that is to reject some of the applications of philosophy in Dr. Peikoff’s podcasts on the grounds that Objectivism – and philosophy in general – ought not to have anything to say about certain topics. Among those topics discussed have been whether or not the New York City Mosque ought to be built after the atrocities of 911, transgenderism and whether or not a sex change is moral, and the best way of fighting terrorism, among others. I don’t know where these disagreements are coming from. I don’t know if it is from Diana Hsieh, the Kelleyites, or some other influence, but it does seem to be widespread considering the conflicts I have had with quite a few people on forum.objectivismonline.net forums. Some would say just to leave them alone and find a better forum, but I don’t think it is just that forum as the attitude also extends to some of my FaceBook friends and a general hatred of checkingpremises.org. A few have gone so far as to imply that Dr. Peikoff “has lost it”, or that he is being dishonest in applying Objectivism to areas where it shouldn’t have anything to say about a topic, or that he is an Objectivist in name only because they disagree with him. Philosophy is a wide set of integrated principles guiding a man’s thoughts about the nature of existence and man’s place in it. As such, it gives a man a special intellectual frame-work with which to guide his thinking. For many philosophies, a practical guide to living on earth is not given. These philosophies give wide principles or pseudo-principles in a mind / body dichotomy way – philosophy is for intellectualizing divorced from living one’s life practically. But Objectivism is certainly different. Ayn Rand identified Objectivism as a philosophy of living on earth; which means that it gives more practical guidance explicitly versus most any other philosophy. And since Objectivism is based on the facts of reality in a wider and wider integration of those facts, applications based on Objectivism can get down to many more specific areas than most any other philosophy. Basically, anytime there is a need for broad principles to guide one’s thoughts and actions, an Objectivist philosopher or even a long-term Objectivist can give one the principles to guide one in how to think about the facts prevalent to the more specific issues. Philosophy as such cannot tell you what to have for breakfast, but it can tell you that given the nature of man and the fact that he needs to eat certain things in order to remain alive, that one ought to have a nutritious meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Similarly, given the nature of egoism – the morality of Objectivism -- philosophy can tell you that when you are confronted by an enemy who seeks to destroy you and your country that you ought to defend yourself in the most efficient manner possible. It cannot tell you to use either guns or knives or karate to defend yourself in those specifics, but it can tell you that egoism requires also acknowledging the necessity of self-defense if one values one’s own life. So, in broad principles, it can tell you to destroy the enemy – no holds barred. Similarly, since morality stems from a rational understanding of the nature of man and the requirements of sustaining one’s own life, that certain medical procedures that go to the root of what it is to be that particular individual ought to be avoided. For example, a frontal lobotomy might make you more manageable, but it is not recommended as this would take away one’s ability to reason and possibly one’s free will. Since one’s sex or gender is fully integrated down to the individual cells and molecular structure of one’s body, then just making a physical change to one’s genitals is not recommended, since such a change would not be integrated into the rest of one’s body – at least not with modern technology. So, a sex change is not recommended, and is certainly immoral if one claims to want one with no reason behind it and just going by one’s will and introspection as to one’s gender. I’m not here trying to imply that if you disagree with Dr. Peikoff on a particular topic, that he is necessarily right because he is a long-term Objectivist and an Objectivist philosopher. The issue is not agreement or disagreement, but rather following the proper objective methodology and applying broad philosophical principles to one’s daily life and the issues confronting oneself. If you can show that you can apply objectivity to the issues and come up with a better solution, that’s great, and I encourage you to think it through. But if a man has shown himself to be a great philosopher in his own right, in his lectures and books based on Objectivism, then I think one ought to really think it through before stating that he has lost it or that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.

But dealing with terrorism and the cause of terrorism **is** a foreign policy position. My point is that it is NOT a specific military or police action policy. So I am in complete agreement with Ayn Rand, and so is Dr. Peikoff, who was not offering specific military advise, like how to best attack Iran, for example.

Yeah, right...like the FBI and the CIA, who are supposed to keep track of these things, prevented the first bombing of the WTC and certainly stopped 911 dead in its tracks! The whole problem has been treating it like criminal activity instead of State sponsored terrorism, and guess who came up with the answer to that one? Why, it was our good friend Dr. Peikoff, now to be known by some to be an Objectivist in name only and dishonest for applying the principles of Objectivism to real-world situations. If his suggestion had been followed in End States Who Sponsor Terrorism (written 10 years before 911), those terrorist attacks would never have happened. But that's only theory according to some on this forum, and there is no need to apply philosophy to real-world events. Philosophers -- especially rational philosophers -- ought to just keep quite about those things and stick to theorizing about forms of syllogisms or whatever, so long as they do not try to apply it to real-world events.

I'm doing my best to ignore J13 and Ninth Doctor due to some of the things they've said in threads (including this one), but I cannot let this off-hand remark against Dr. Peikoff stand. You are implicitly asserting that Dr. Peikoff is an Objectivist in name only because he is against the building of the NYC Mosque near Ground Zero. We've discussed this thoroughly in several threads, and it is not a violation of rights to defend oneself against a vicious enemy who is seeking to become established in the United States and especially seeking to build a monument to their wanton acts of destruction on 911. The right to life comes before the right to property -- i.e. one cannot make the claim that a murderer's property rights are violated when one removes him from his house and throws him in jail for murder. And since the terrorists of 911 made their attacks in the name of Islam and were perfectly consistent with Islam, then yes, Islam can be throttled in the USA, at least until the war is over an we have decidedly won the war and they swear to never attack us again. Moderators: If these two posts need to be moved to another thread, then do that, but I couldn't let it stand.

There is no direct office -- like an office of elections per se -- but there is the Constitution that states that the President must be a natural born citizen, and I have heard from various lawyers over on FaceBook that basically it is the previous Department of State or Congress that would have the final say as to upholding the Constitution on this matter, as they have sworn to uphold the Constitution. I do know that the Democrats tried to block McCain from running due to him being born in Panama, but I don't recall the Republicans making a big deal about Obama being born of one parent being American and the other one being foreign citizenry. Frankly, I don't think the previous administration under Bush would have the balls to block the potential first "African-American" President on a technicality of the Constitution (of all things). One of the documents the Tea Party members were going to present to the NJ court was an analysis of what the Founders meant by "natural born citizen" and their claim is that both parents would have to be American citizens and that the child would have to have been born withing the United States (which would have excluded McCain as well). It is unfortunate that the Founders did not define this phrase, but evidently they didn't think they had to; just as they didn't think they had to define "regular trade" as being a free market under the Commerce Clause. I think this all comes under the heading of a statement that Ayn Rand made: You can make something fool proof, but you cannot make it damned fool proof. In other words, due to changes in the language and moving away from the meaning of Enlightenment phrases (which seemed self-evident to them), all sorts of areas of the Constitution are being mangled for modern political expediency.

No, logically, this isn't true. The burden of proof is on he who asserts the positive. Obama is asserting the positive by saying that the long-form image on his website is a digital image of a paper birth certificate -- and when called upon to do so, he would have to prove that he did indeed have the copy (legit or otherwise) and that he did indeed scan it and did indeed post that scanned image on the internet. Those claiming it is a fake do need some evidence for their claim, but to prove it is a digital image of an original paper copy is up to Obama to prove.

I have to agree with a statement Yaron Brook made regarding the issue of economics. He basically stated that the free-market economists have proven their points over and over again, that a free market is much more efficient at getting valuable goods to the market and that regulations and having to contend with them are costly at all levels without doing much to protect the consumer. So, the real battle is not economic, and I think trying to isolate out the economics of capitalism from the *political* / economic system is like arguing that you need gasoline to operate a car, but it is OK if you throttle the gasoline producers because they are greedy SOB's that are only out to make a profit. In other words, if you want a free economy, then you have to support individual rights and the morality of egoism -- not just focus on one's everyday dealings with bureaucracy -- which is really bad in certain sectors of the economy. Businessmen need to learn to stand up for their rights. Yes, follow the law (or risk going to jail) but write protest letters against it, but not just protest the bad economics -- protest the fact that you are not a slave of the State.

I think part of the problem with this thread so far is that posters are relating how the US is NOW, and not projecting what it will be like if the ideas from the Left and the far Right are taken seriously and implemented. Depending on what you are doing in your life and whether or not you run a company, life isn't all that bad here. I mean, I am not harassed by the police and have never been in trouble with the law and I'm 54 years old -- and I write against the government policies quite often. However, when you have Nancy Pelosi wanting to curtail political freedom of speech for those she is most against (corporations she wants to rule over) and when you have Obama spreading lies that capitalism doesn't work (due to him throttling it with regulations) and wanting total control of the country via Presidential mandates, then one has to take pause and use the skills that Ayn Rand taught you and morally evaluate the ideas coming out of politician's mouths (on both sides). The only thing keeping us free is the checks and balances embedded in the Constitution and that it is at least taken half-way seriously by some American's.

What happened to the side discussion regarding the state of the economy and whether or not we are heading for dictatorship. I think it was off-topic, and I think what needs to be said about Obama's dealings with his birth certificate has been resolved, but I was going to reply to that part of the thread.

You've certainly have a point that I cannot prove that ARI removed DH's OList listing a few months ago due to her continued conflict with Peikoff through those being free to write against him on those forums. ARI didn't come out with an official statement, they just removed the listing without comment. All in all, though, since DH is not asserting that she is speaking qua Objectivist philosopher, then it won't be against Ayn Rand's writings anyhow. I myself consider myself to be an Objectivist but not an Objectivist philosopher because I have not yet come out with my own form of OPAR, and I am assuming DH is doing so likewise. She has stated recently that she and her group are re-studying OPAR, and I sincerely hope it does her well. We need more rational spokespersons for reason.

Right...the point is that if he could have legally asserted under oath via his lawyer that the long-form presented on the internet was a Hawaiian certified duplicate of the actually long-form, then he could have cut to the chase in NJ and told everyone to get off his back. Since he didn't do that, since he and his lawyer skirted the entire issue by saying it wasn't required, then he is only adding fuel to the fire against him by those who says he needs to prove that he was a natural born citizen.Andif you noticed, his lawyer tried to get away with saying that the burden of proof is on those saying he is NOT a natural born citizen, that he doesn't have to prove a damned thing. Fortunately, the Tea Party advocate lawyer and the judge killed that maneuver post hast.

By the way, those of you arguing that the long-form birth certificate was a fake due to image quality and possible edits, it is now totally beside the point. After the NJ trial shown above, it doesn't matter one squit what the documents was forged or not (as in not a image of a real document) because Obama will never use it in a court of law to assert that he is a natural born citizen. Maybe it is a fake and maybe it isn't, but it doesn't matter what he presented to the American people and to the world because it could never prove his place of birth one way or the other not being a Hawaii certified document. And I do say that the fact that he could assert one thing to the populous and yet something entirely different in a court of law does come from Kantian premises. The idea that reality conforms to the subject and especially conforms to a collective subject is straight out of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Obama's mannerisms (and the mannerisms of every collectivist dictator in the 19th and 20th Century) comes from the idea that there is no truth independent of human subjective consciousness.

I found an article that has the relevant video at the bottom of the NJ trial. From listening to it carefully (turn the volume up because the sound quality is very bad), Obama's lawyer admitted that the image presented on the internet was never intended to be a Hawaii certified legal document and would not be offered as evidence for Obama being a natural born citizen. When pressed further, Obama's lawyer said it would not be so presented because there was nothing in the New Jersey law that stipulated that one's natural born citizenship had to be legally documented before getting on the Presidential ballot. The spin on the right and throughout the Tea Party affiliates is that therefore Obama's layer had admitted that the internet image is a forgery, but this was not something Obama's lawyer agreed to -- she only agreed that it was not a certified copy and that it would not be used in court. So, the bottom line is that it doesn't matter what was put on the long-form image, since Obama never said it was a certified copy in the first place.

Considering your inability to think past the level of a sound-bite, you are quite free to ignore me. But her OList being delisted wasn't for the same reason as her FRO delisting of her name, from what I can tell from a few people who have direct contact with ARI / Dr. Peikoff.

I agree with SN basic assertion about the Tea Party associates -- they are a rag-tail bunch. However, they do want to hold our government officials to the meaning of the Constitution and they do want freedom. Their problem is that they do not have an intellectual base and tend to be more "common sense" oriented, but don't present a coherent rational philosophy. They desperately need one, and a large part of our future as free Americans hinges on them getting one.

Talk about hyperbole! I did not say that the State must endorse or certify anything or everything you do; what I am saying is that when it comes to official government documents -- like a birth certificate or a driver's license -- then, yes, it must be certified by the State according to the law; and no, I could not use my own photograph for a driver's licenses.