LaszloWalrus

I'm only read parts of what he's written, but the basic thesis running through what I've read is that "too much" rationality leads to disaster.

Well, many brilliant businessmen (Buffet, Soros, etc.) have horrible views on economic theory.

But doesn't the notion that trade deficits are harmful assume that wealth is static? The US is still engaged in production. The fact that its people buy more from people of other nations doesn't change the fact that the US is producing wealth.

Could you give an example of this? Conventional bombing sure seemed to work against Germany. What is so special about atomic bombs? Also, Paul Tibbets, who piloted the airplane carrying Fat Man, never felt regret or any kind of psychological trouble for what he did.

The US only accepted the Japanese terms AFTER the Japanese offered unconditional surrender. The important point was that the Japanese were WILLING to accept ANY terms after the second bomb. I assume others will take up the other points in your post.

I've selected a few of these objections to answer. Why is being the first nation to use nuclear weapons bad? Are nuclear weapons intrinsically bad? Otherwise, the objection that the U.S. should not have been "the first nation to use nuclear weapons" is pointless. As to the two cities being of limited military value: even assuming that that claim is true, killing massive numbers of civilians was the point. Killing massive numbers of civilians showed the general Japanese population the price of Japan's aggression. As to the claim that the U.S. did not "give enough time for word to filter" before bombing Nagasaki: since when is it a nation's obligation to wait for an aggressor to get the message? Waiting would have led to many more Allied lives lost. The claim that "American refusal to modify its 'unconditional surrender' demand to allow the Japanese to keep the emperor needlessly prolonged Japan's resistance" is strange. A surrender with strings attached is not a real surrender.

The American Nazi Party is hardly a mass movement of Nazis. To say that my statement is absurd because there are still some people, somewhere who believe in Nazism is, well, absurd. There is no mass Nazi movement today, like there was in WWII.

Ultimately, the ideas can only be defeated by superior ideas, but that doesn't mean that the physical manifestation of those ideas can only be defeated by superior ideas. We need not convert the Islamic world to reason, but a real war, a war conducted like WWII would show Islamic totalitarian states that the ideas they hold lead to their own destruction.

And then there's this:

As president, Paul can do nothing or next to nothing about taxes, social security, etc. He can be influential in the realms of foreign policy (where he believes, absurdly, that the US was attacked because of legitimate grievances from the Islamic world). He can do something about abortion (via Supreme Court appointments), which he is against. He can act as a powerful champion for the anti-immigration position. And none of this takes into account the fact that Paul doesn't believe in evolution or the separation of church and state.

If you're interested in eventually going to graduate school in philosophy, then, all else equal, go to the best regarded undergraduate program you can get into, NOT the school with highest regarded philosophy department (I offer this advice based on my conversations with various philosophy academics, Objectivist and otherwise). There are quite a number of highly-regarded US universities: the Ivy League (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Brown, and Dartmouth), and Stanford, Duke, Chicago, MIT, and Caltech. You might also look at liberal arts colleges, like Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore.

Try to construct an argument (even a bad one) without using any sensory material and without assuming that existence exists.

That's what I thought too, but I second-guessed my interpretation, since it would imply racism.

No, it doesn't. The Saudis, et. al. torture for no reason at all. What is meant by "we Anglos"?

I remember seeing English-language editions of Atlas Shrugged in a bookstore in Hong Kong.

I'm skeptical of the view that homosexuality is caused by chemicals. Why were so many of the ancient Greeks gay or bisexual?

So, if a guy names his son after Ayn Rand (something I find to be quite strange) and says a sentence that Ayn Rand would agree with, he must "follow Objectivist Ideals" and anyone who says otherwise "must be delusional." I see.

I would have responded to this as well, but I thought it was an absurd joke.

Neither of these is true. Giuliani did NOT receive a knighthood. The award he received from the Queen is only honorary. Even if he did accept a knighthood, I fail to see how this makes him a "traitor."

Induction is not enumerative. The fact that all states in the past have become bad does not imply that every state by nature must become bad.

Isn't this another version of the broken window fallacy? The government destroyed wealth by regulating gas prices (driving up the costs of goods and services generally). Out of this regulation comes (supposedly) the hybrid car. What about all of the wealth that was destroyed? What about all of the other goods and services we don't have because of the regulation?

I think TR, Wilson, and Carter compete for "worst president" spot as well.

The "community" has lost the time and raw materials needed to make the new window.

James Watt, inventor (well, techincally modifier) of the steam engine, the impetus of the Industrial Revolution.

Those specific actions would not have happened, but the implication of your statement is that Iran wouldn't be violently hostile to the West (and to the US in particular) had the US not been "over there in the first place."