Lathanar

The gun is a really bad analogy for this discussion. The only reason a gun was even brought up was pointing out the fact that the seeing the gun wasn't what was violating rights, it was the man waving the gun in a threatening manner. CF's arguments with sexual integrity have nothing to do with threats of physical harm to one's body, just in your having to think about something you'd rather not. He's not even talking about perceiving and interpreting someone's actions, just percieving a sexual body part is enough.

Yes, arming the mujahideen to create instability in Russian Afghanistan worked out well.

No, I'm not expecting the accused to be omniscient at all, you are. Yes it's very subjective, which is the point I was trying to make. The somebody in your statement is the accused, the you is the accuser. The accuser is expecting the accused to know that in that circumstance that exposing a sexual organ is a sexual activity for them. It has to be shown that the accused meant it to be something, not that the accuser, the perceiver, took it that way. You're contradicting yourself again If a body part in one situation is a sexual activity, and in another situation not a sexual activity, then the simple act of percieving it can not make it so. A can not be A over here and B over there.

Indentification of a threat requires you to observe the situation and then make a decision based on those observations. The simple act of perceiving does not create a violation of rights, you have to go through a thought process to determine that. If best friend says "I'll kill you" after you throw water on them and you're both laughing, it's much different than if a stranger shouts "I'll kill you" while rushing at you. Hearing the words does not make it an initiation of force, it's the context. When the law makes a determination on whether an action was a threat or not, it is supposed to figure out what the intent of the accused was, to prove he actual made a threat. The fact that the accuser interpreted it as a threat is already established. Your position has been that just seeing, the simple act of perceiving, a sexual body part is a sexual activity, that's not subjective, simply wrong. Several of us have gone on to show you why this can't be. Then you go on to say that seeing a sexual body part in one situation is not sexual activity while it is at other times based solely on what a person expects to see in that situation. This is completely subjective. Your expecting the woman to be omniscient and know that you don't expect to see her bra. This is the same grounds the stupid sexual harrasment laws now use in the work place. You can hug a co-worker and she may be just fine with it, but some one observing from a distance might find that to be offensive, or in your case a 'sexual activity', and file a claim against it. Either 1)the act of perceiving the bra is a sexual activity. or 2)you must be able to perceive the bra, the woman, the place she's doing it, etc to set a context for you to make a decision whether it is a sexual activity or not. Which is it. I am not agreeing with your claim that either constitutes a sexual activity, I'm just trying to point out your contradiction.

Yes, we went over early in the thread talking about what contexts would actually have been violations, but it soon devolved to the simple act of her perceiving his penis was a sexual activity and a violation, regardless the manner of how he showed it or why.

Miller was jailed because she would not divulge information the prosecution already had. How could national security at stake if she had nothing to add.

The point is hearing and understanding the words alone are not enough to be a violation of rights. It is the manner in which the words are delivered and other factors involved. The phrase "I'm going to kill you" can come up quite a lot of different ways in a variety of situations that are not a violation of rights. The perception of reality does not violate anyone's rights, it's only the actions of others that does. A gun doesn't violate rights, waving it threatenly does. A phrase doesn't violate rights, threatening someone by use of a phrase does. A penis doesn't violate rights, threatening someone with one does. You have to perceive the objects before you can determine intent. I don't know how I can state this clearer.

There is where you go wrong. You keep asserting this and offer nothing to back it up. More than that, you make it totally subjective. I may expect to see nudity in a locker room, so seeing a sexual organ is not sexual activity, but I may not expect to see it in a different setting so then it is. It's all left up to what I expect. A person wanders onto a nude beach without realizing and sees a naked woman, it's sexual activity for him and not anyone else on the beach since they know it's a nude beach. [edit - clarification]

Out of curiosity, if the contract between the company and the customer said that bills may be paid in cash, but did not specify the form of cash, would they be wrong to refuse the coins? I read a story a while back about a man who went in to pay a bill at Best Buy using a stack of 2 dollar bills. The cashier didn't think it was real money and refused to take it for which the man said either you do or I'm not paying the bill. He ended up being arrested and the secret service was called in because they still thought 2 dollar bills were fake. Was the company in the wrong for refusing a payment in 2 dollar bills if they were willing to take it in 5 dollar bills?

Perception is not just that first level, that is what the senses give us, perception is recognizing what those senses give us so we can act upon it. If the automatic process of sound waves into language and translated into concepts, or the recognition of light waves into images that can translate into a concept is brought into the world of volitional where you can choose to translate it or not, then any spoken phrase that a person says that initiates thoughts of sex would under CF's logic be a violation of rights, let alone a simple image. Everytime some one says or displays something you are "forcing" them to form a thought process to understand what their senses are telling them. This is not initiation of force or violation of rights. The repeated blasting of loud music is very different. After you understand what it is you can go ask the other person to stop and if they refuse, then you can talk about rights violations. If disturbing noises were a violation of rights, anytime the neighbor dropped a pan, tripped and fell and made a loud noise, his baby cried, etc., he'd be violating rights, which is ridiculous.

Perception does not create reality or morality. It is not your perception of the robber that makes you comply, it's your perception that enables you to gain all the facts you can use to make a decision to comply or not.

Checks and Balances are to control the abuse and concentration of power within the government structure, not to limit the size.

I think people need to give kids a little more credit. Children are capable of understanding a lot, which is why we worry about what influences them at an early age like tv. I've already had to have the god conversation with my 4 and 6 year old, not really because I initiated it, they did. If they can deal with the concept of god, they can deal with A is A. I for one would love to be able to find children's Objectivist material, it's my influences on them vs the influences of the rest of our culture and I need all the help I can get.

Saturnalia was the celebration he used to replace with Jesus' birthday.

Nope, no contradiction intended. Just pointing out just how bad it was. They didn't simply use the bible to make their kids hack through, they made a ciriculum to teach them based on the bible.

Actually, colonial Massachusetts had a very high literacy rate and the primer that was used to teach all these kids was this New England Primer.

Caucasian does not actually mean white as it does in America. Caucasian actually means someone descended from the Caucasus region of central Europe/Asia like Georgia and Armenia and covers a wide range of people.

There are too many children stories teaching children bad value systems right now. We need some that show good. It doesn't need to be OPAR level.

Then sleeping with a sheep is discriminate sex. If we can't agree even on the very basics of what discriminate/indiscriminate sex is then there's not much point in continuing this. For the quoting Rand, I believe a lot of the quotes put forth in this thread were in response to 'Rand never said what her stance was' type of statements.

They are questions. I'll do a question at atime and work through it if it's esiear. Is the fact that I pick a human woman to sleep with mean it has gone past indiscriminate sex? For the questions you answered That is hedonism when pleasure is the value. I say it is immoral.

Forget the reason of why I am doing an act, just that I chose the settings? I don't care who I sleep with as long as they are a) human, b ) female is enough to make it discriminate non-casual sex? Ok, you sleep with a woman who is absolutely beautiful. What value did you gain? Would you gain less value from admiring their beauty if you didn't sleep with them? Are you gaining value simply by being able to say I slept with her? What value do you get simply from sleeping with someone without consideration of who they are, what their values are or what they represent? People keep saying that a man who sleeps with beautiful woman is discriminating based on the value he finds in her beauty. So what? What about the woman? That is not a situation of finding your values in another, he is not concerned with the woman's values are so how could he even exchange them? What if she's a communist? What values are you celebrating then? Forget the ideology as long as I find value in her form. In this context, the less you know about a person when you sleep with them, the better, as long as you're pursuing your own values ignorance is bliss when dealing with other people.

Not to pick on you, but your response is a nice case in point so I'll use it. This is not discriminating sex. Your are picking someone to sleep with based on what you value without regard to what they value. At that point you might as well be sleeping with a good looking sheep, as long as it looks good, who cares what or if it thinks?

When you are having sex just for the pleasure of it, what can you discriminate on? You have to pick someone, or something as the case may be, yes. If you start looking for someone that simply looks like they will be a good lay, or some nice docile looking sheep, what values are you choosing other than what you think will give the highest amount of pleasure for the effort? Where are you deriving that value from to say it's being discriminating? I don't find indiscriminate, casual sex to be immoral soley because it's not a response to values, it's also where the values being responded to are derived from. There's a lot of positions being stated and half of them seem to be that you must find certain amount of value in the other person and the other half that the person must be the highest value in their life. I have issues with some of the value flinging Rand does in her descriptions of sex, it gets contradictory at places and is hard to sort out, but some of the value flinging on here is much worse. Sex should be a response to values another person holds that match your own, in other words, you should like each other. How much you should like each other before jumping in bed is up to each person. [edit for clarity]

I believe it's addressed the same as the need to satisfy hunger. We need to use reason to figure out how to satisfy the need for food, we need reason to figure out how to satisfy the need for sex. We can obtain food a moral way or we can obtain food immorally, i.e. stealing food may keep us full but it's still wrong. Same thing with sex, there's a wrong way to go about it.

I don't know about anyone else, but I place sex for mere physical pleasure under the heading indiscriminate sex.