miseleigh

Let's see, summer activities... Organizing & playing Ultimate Frisbee every Sunday afternoon and Tuesday evening Reading: Harry Potter series (well, rereading that one), VOS, Discarded Science by John Grant (very interesting book by the way, I highly recommend it), and OPAR when I'm done with one of the above Two summer jobs (web design and robotics high school camp counselor) which I tend to stay late at Planning a web jewelry design business & hopefully soon actually getting it running (It's going very slowly, though) Spending weekends with my boyfriend And I'm in the very early stages of writing a book. (This is going even slower than my jewelry business. Ah well... it's going, at least.) Yeah, not much time left for the forum. I read new topics during my lunch hour at work, and that's about all I have time for. I'm sure I'll be posting quite a bit when I'm done with OPAR and VOS, though.

It certainly isn't sexual in the locker room, so no, I don't disagree. Inspector, she was asking about contexts and intentionally not specifying any... although she did word it somewhat awkwardly. I would translate that as 'does anyone think showing one's naked body to another human being is necessarily sexual?' Ifat, correct me if I got that wrong...

Thanks all, that was really helpful, both to clarify it in my own mind as well as enable me to put up something of a defense for economic individual rights. Hopefully I can explain it well, too...

I recently started a group on facebook, mostly just for fun but with a serious political flavor to it as well, and already I have wall posts that disagree with the group's premise that I'm not sure how to respond to. I'm not as well-read on the political/economic side of Objectivism as I am on the ethics portion, and I'd like to get a response posted quickly, so if any of you would like to help me out I'd really appreciate it. Group name & description: This is the wall post that I'm having trouble with. I don't entirely understand how a complete capitalist economy would take care of these problems, so I'm not sure how to respond. Thanks!

Your statement hasn't 'sunk in' yet because the topic at hand does not have the option of both truth and life. It is obvious that one would prefer the truth and life over lies and life... but if the situation doesn't allow for the preferred option, would you take a lie and life over truth and death? Personally, I would rather be lied to and live than be told the truth and die. And yes, I would rather be told the truth and live than either of those two options, but this topic assumes that can't be done. No, you're not saying that at all. Let's see if I can come up with some decent example situations here. I know these situations aren't quite possible (I'm not a medical person by any means) but they should get the point across. I'm having a stroke. Now, I know that strokes are caused by blood clots that prevent blood from reaching my brain. The longer one waits to receive treatment, the more brain damage one ends up with, so I want the doctor to work quickly. Because I know what causes strokes, I know that my treatment should consist of a clot-busting drug, or something that thins my blood. Certainly the last thing I would want is a blood thickener. Now, the doctor knows of some recent research that shows that a blood thickener actually helps more than the treatment I expect, but when he tells me this I get upset because I don't believe it could be true. The longer the doctor spends trying to convince me of the safety of the new drug, the more brain damage I get. At this point, I would prefer it if the doctor gave me the new drug even though I don't think I want in (in other words, lie to me) so I would get better, and then later (when I'm out of danger) explain what he did and why, along with some of the experiments that show this drug was better than the treatment I had been expecting. (Note: the doctor also knew that I wanted effective treatment.) It wasn't that the doctor thought I was incapable of handling the truth; it was my lack of knowledge and lack of time that prevented him from telling me. Now an example relating to the original topic, involving psychology more than physical treatment (this one will be even worse medically, almost ridiculous. Sorry about that.) My sister has an infection of some sort. I know that this particular type of infection can be deadly, and her chances of surviving it are not good. She asks me if she's going to live through it. "Yes, Amy, you're going to get through this." Now Amy, believing that she's going to survive, is happier. Her brain releases more endorphins. The endorphins help her immune system kick into overdrive, and (with the help of some drugs as well) she fights off the infection. Without those extra endorphins (in other words, if I'd told her the truth instead of telling her she'd survive) she would have died. And, of course, RationalBiker's got some excellent points as well. I do not think I would deal well with lots of pain. I really have no idea what it would take for someone to convince me that a treatment I thought was the wrong one was actually the right one when I'm in pain, or if I've had a major concussion, etc. I would prefer it if they just gave me the right treatment while telling me that it's the treatment I expected, and later, when I'm better, they can explain.

Sooo... God's nose is Satan?

I absolutely, totally, thoroughly, and wholeheartedly agree! For people still in school, many colleges have ballroom dance teams (like the one I'm on) that are great for meeting and getting to know people. There's also the competitive aspect to dance as well, competing is a lot of fun and a great way to encourage yourself to become a better dancer. Dan, your article is well written and convincing - if I wasn't already a dancer, I'd go try it this weekend. One criticism: "This effects the way you walk and communicate non-verbally"(p. 5) -> "effects" should be "affects".

All right, here's a few for you: Link I had to check: Fornication.—Sexual intercourse between an unmarried male and an unmarried female. As defined in Chapter 277, Section 39. Link I guess I have to kill my pink rabbits and purple ducks before I can show them to anyone. Link "Crime against nature" isn't specifically defined, but I think we all know what they meant. Link I think this says I can't write a check for less than $5. Well, that's what debit is for anyway And now for my personal favorite... Link Lovely, ain't it? So much for separation of church and state. [ed: fixed typo in link, DO]

Dance dance revolution (the video game), reading, this forum, ballroom dancing, drawing, writing, cooking, watching movies & hanging out with friends, jewelry making, teaching myself to play the piano, biking, boggle, sudoku, crossword puzzles... there are occasionally other things that take up my spare time too, but that's most of them. House is definitely a good tv show, but I watch the Law & Order shows more often. (Except when my sister, the physical therapy student, is home... then we watch House constantly.)

I know that not all of my quotes above relate to Rand's statement; some were meant to apply to other pieces of this thread. The ones involving "their" were responses to your statement earlier, where I thought you were trying to apply "their" to a singular antecedent. (Perhaps I misunderstood.) The ones about collective nouns were intended to apply to Rick Pritchett's statement: Which, of course, you have said is blatantly ungrammatical in English. If you want to claim it's blatantly ungrammatical in modern American then I won't argue, but it's acceptable in England, as Capitalism Forever pointed out. I apologize for trying to cover too many separate issues at once. I was not trying to say that Rand should have used anything other than "their," nor do I think she was treating "men" as a collective noun. Claire Kehrwald Cook's book is the best reference I have available for the 'mind vs. minds' question. It was copyrighted in 1985, so if you have an older book that addresses this, please share with us. I believe that Cook's second example, "All in favor raise their right hand," was supposed to be fixed by changing 'hand' to 'hands' rather than letting them share a hand. That's in the section where she's talking about subject-object agreement. Here are some other examples she uses: "Lawyers are told that if they do not become a partner [become partners] by age forty they never will." "'This is the line being peddlied behind the furrowed brow of the most earnest and nonpartisan politicians.' Of course, changing brow to brows won't help if you're troubled by the notion of peddling a line behind a brow, but that's not the issue here." Although Cook does not state this in a clear-cut rule, she goes through several examples of sentences where people are sharing things they shouldn't be, and then goes on to show some examples where the object ought to be singular ("They keep their apartment neat" where 'they' refers to people living in the same apartment.) She also makes sure that the reader knows that attributes, like courage, are always singular. I would try to base the answer on the English language itself if I could, but my only reference for that is me, and I absolutely think that Rand made a mistake in letting men share a single mind.

At least for the first one, a 'no' answer would also imply that it's immoral to adopt, since they're not your 'real' children. In other words, it doesn't matter if the child is (or could be) biologically yours. As for two, I don't see why not... the species barrier is viable offspring, so as long as my kid could reproduce with gills, hell, let him have gills. At least I would never have to worry about drowning. The reproduction argument isn't much of a barrier anyway, since we'd be able to engineer his kids, and their kids... Would they be human? Maybe not, but they'd still be rational animals. I would be careful about making my kid look different from other people, so he doesn't get ridiculed or beat up or something, but gills would rock, and webbed toes to go with them, and built-in sunscreen, and whatever else we could dream up. The morality of it, for me anyway, seems to equate to living with intelligent, rights-respecting extra-terrestrials, or artificially intelligent robots. Edit: Note: I am not Objectivist, I am just a student of Oism, so don't take my word for it.

Sparknotes' Ultimate Style by Emma Chastain, page 56, under the heading "Gendered Language" and sub-heading "Their": "What you cannot do is match a singular noun with the plural possessive their in an attempt to be [gender] neutral." The "Plurals" entry has nothing applicable to the statement in question. There is a list of words that "look plural but are actually singular" and should be treated as such; audience is one. Cook's more thorough Line by Line lists audience as a word that can be either plural or singular. "If the collective noun denotes a unit, make it singular; if it refers to the individuals the group comprises, make it plural" (p 84). An example she gives is "The department comes from a variety of backgrounds" where 'comes' ought to be 'come', since a singular department comes from one place whereas the department members can come from several places. Cook also says that using 'they' as a singular third-person pronoun is not grammatically correct, but since there is historical precedent for it and some contemporary writes advocate its use, that rule may change. Cook does actually discuss the plurality issue we're talking about in Rand's sentence. "Guard against making two or more share something concrete that they don't have in common. Statements like We all got our driver's license at the age of seventeen and All in favor raise their right hand are careless and illogical" (p 96). Strunk and White agree with using singular pronouns even if the sentence becomes awkward; however, the original edition of The Elements of Style was copyrighted in 1935, and I daresay Strunk hadn't dealt with the gender issues we have now - the book recommends using 'he' as a generic third-person pronoun rather than 'he or she.' Strunk and White also say that "the number of the subject determines the number of the verb" (p 9). I can't find anything about mind vs. minds, though. I also didn't find anything about collective nouns. Now from Susan Anker's Real Essays with Readings, which has a few chapters on grammar: "A pronoun must agree with (match) the noun or pronoun it refers to in number: It must be singular (one) or plural (more than one). If it is singular, it must also match its noun or pronoun in gender." (The parentheticals are there because this text focuses on being comprehensive for ESL students as well as native speakers.) Audience is listed as a common collective noun with some plural cases, and one example is "The audience took their seats," which would indeed be 'have taken' for the present perfect tense. Unfortunately, I can't find anything about the pronoun-object agreement in this text either. (Technically I don't think 'mind' is an object, since there's no verb acting on it, but I'm not sure what else to call it.) So my Cook book is the only reference I have for the original question, but all 4 books agree when it comes to pronoun-antecedent agreement, and they agree when it comes to collective nouns versus individuals of a group. (Except the Sparknotes book, which probably would have agreed if it was just a little more thorough. That entry was very short.) Let me know if you still want credibility info for my sources; I can try to find something if necessary. At the very least, I can tell you that Cook has the Modern Language Association backing her up - the association holds the copyright, and she was a copy editor for them. Whew. Long post. And all just for a slight grammatical error that may have been a typo... Edit: all italics are original, btw.

Well, when I have questions about grammar or other writing questions, I go to some books I have by Lynn Truss, William Strunk & E.B. White, Susan Anker, and Claire Kehrwald Cook. As for why they have authority on the subject - well, their books tend to agree with each other, they've been highly recommended by several of my English professors, and they seem to be well-respected in their field. However, I haven't made an extensive background check on any of them for authority, so that is all I can give you. On the subject-pronoun agreement issue, Anker and Cook agree, while Truss makes no mention of it in the one book of hers I own; I haven't checked Strunk & White's book for that one yet. I will when I get home, though. As for "The audience have taken their seats," I will have to double-check, but I think Anker at least agrees with this one too.

"The only value that men can offer me is the work of their mind" Common does not mean correct. It is not grammatically correct to use 'their' when the antecedent is singular, no matter how useful it is. However, subject-pronoun agreement isn't at issue here; if you noticed, you changed your example sentences around to match the plurality of mind to the plurality of man, which is, I think, what the original question was. In this particular case, there are several ways to fix it (I prefer the first): "The only value that men can offer me is the work of their minds" "The only value that man can offer me is the work of his mind" Although personally, I would have made the whole sentence plural, even though it changes the meaning slightly: "The only values that men can offer me are the works of their minds" Unless Rand was implying that men have one collective mind, either the plural form should be used or the whole sentence should have single subjects,. However, if all the men do share a single mind, the sentence is grammatically correct. Following the same rules, the first and third sentences in the given examples above are correct, and the second is only correct if the women share a single car or the dogs share a single behind (or all the teams share the same home stadium.)

As interesting as they are, I'd be careful with these bits of information. Remember that the environmentalist's argument isn't that CO2 in itself is a pollutant, but instead is a pollutant in the quantities it is being produced in; also, it isn't that humans produce more of it than the 'natural' evironment, but that humans have caused a significant rise in CO2 levels. To argue against this you'll have to show that the additional CO2 humans produce causes no harm to the environment, or that we don't produce more CO2 than we have in the past (which, as GreedyCapitalist said, would be very hard to do.) Also, the fact that water is more 'greenhousy' than CO2 doesn't really add anything substantial to your paper, since it doesn't lessen the effects that CO2 might have, so I wouldn't suggest using that.

I always thought that Native Americans didn't believe land could be owned. Is that wrong?

What about all the Objectivists that you know of? Peikoff can't be living on the poverty line, and Dr. Ellen Kenner has a popular radio show. And some of us may be struggling students, but I think we're happier students than the non-Objectivist ones. Doesn't that count for something? As for Objectivism not focusing on how to create wealth... maybe that's because it's trying to focus on happiness instead. How is being a film director an unrealistic goal? They exist, don't they?

Do you know of any groups in MA? I'd love some rational face-to-face conversation once in a while...

Slogans: "Melts in your Megan, not in your hand." "And all because the lady loves Megan." "Come fly the friendly Megan." "You can't top a Megan." Damn right! "Why can't everything orange be Megan?" From the movie quotes: "To Megan, and beyond!" "May the Megan be with you." "Pay not attention to that man behind the Megan." "One morning I shot an elephant in my Megan. How he got in my Megan, I don't know." This is fun

You mean you don't learn anything? That physically alters your brain...

It's not the accepted medical spelling, but it's the Latin one that a lot of people use. So, yes, it's an alternate spelling.

I understand the feeling that they're trying to describe (at least I think I do.) However, I don't think it's as second-handed as it sounds. There have been lots of cases where I have set aside what I would want in another context because the man I love wants something different. I see this as acting to keep a higher value - my man - rather than sacrificing my particular preference of a movie. There are also plenty of cases where I make sure he knows what I want. I also seriously wouldn't call it 'chickening out of potentially successful negotiations with men' or being 'cautious of acting different from the way a man expects them to.' I'm sure there are women who do that sort of thing, but that's a different beast than ignoring some of my own (minor) preferences in favor of his. Besides, I expect him to do the same "for me" once in a while, because I expect him to care about what I want. It's a give-and-take thing. If he always insists on having his way, what kind of relationship is that? I do think women value the relationship itself more than men do, so my guess is women do this sort of thing more often, but at least for me it's because the things I give up aren't things I care that much about, and it's often worth it just to see him smile. Kind of like offering the last cookie to your best friend even though you'd like to eat it but you know it's her facorite kind. You just value the person more than the cookie. Sometimes she'll offer it right back, but you insist; sometimes she'll offer the cookie back and you'll accept, because you figure she works the same way you do. Maybe they're talking about something a little more serious than what I'm talking about. I don't really know. And obviously if you're doing that sort of thing because you think it's expected of you instead of the reason I use, there's a couple problems there. I understand the feeling that they're trying to describe (at least I think I do.) However, I don't think it's as second-handed as it sounds. There have been lots of cases where I have set aside what I would want in another context because the man I love wants something different. I see this as acting to keep a higher value - my man - rather than sacrificing my particular preference of a movie. There are also plenty of cases where I make sure he knows what I want. I also seriously wouldn't call it 'chickening out of potentially successful negotiations with men' or being 'cautious of acting different from the way a man expects them to.' I'm sure there are women who do that sort of thing, but that's a different beast than ignoring some of my own (minor) preferences in favor of his. Besides, I expect him to do the same "for me" once in a while, because I expect him to care about what I want. It's a give-and-take thing. If he always insists on having his way, what kind of relationship is that? I do think women value the relationship itself more than men do, so my guess is women do this sort of thing more often, but at least for me it's because the things I give up aren't things I care that much about, and it's often worth it just to see him smile. Kind of like offering the last cookie to your best friend even though you'd like to eat it but you know it's her facorite kind. You just value the person more than the cookie. Sometimes she'll offer it right back, but you insist; sometimes she'll offer the cookie back and you'll accept, because you figure she works the same way you do. Maybe they're talking about something a little more serious than what I'm talking about. I don't really know. And obviously if you're doing that sort of thing because you think it's expected of you instead of the reason I use, there's a couple problems there.

Here is an article by Paul Ekman, one of the researchers cited in the article I read for my psych class. He talks about several cross-cultural studies he and others have done, what they mean, the criticisms from each, and more supporting evidence to refute the criticisms. facial_expression.pdf This article is more about heredity of individual differences in emotional expressions (exs. dimples or not when smiling), but the method used involved blind people and their families, with surveys to show that the blind people didn't learn their facial expressions by touching their family member's faces. The problem with this one is that it doesn't rule out learning through hearing what an emotion is supposed to look like. Scientific American: Blind Relatives Prove Facial Expressions Are Inherited Unfortunately both of these are just articles about studies and aren't actually links to the studies, but I never know how to find those and really don't have time to keep looking right now. Another study that looks promising is entitled "Spontaneous Expressive Control in Blind and Sighted Children", by Pamela M. Cole, Peggy A. Jenkins, and Cora T. Shott, but I don't really want to pay to read it and can't find much more than the abstract.

What's going on is this: implies is to causes as rectangle is to square. Just as a rectangle can be a square but it isn't always a square, implication can be causal but it doesn't have to be. As has been said, there isn't a logical equivalent of causal relationships. So when you take your ~B=>~A statement and try to convert the => back to 'causes', you're going to have problems. Assume p= 'A causes B'. Assume q= 'A=>B'. So p=>q, and also ~q=>~p. However, q=>p does not follow.

I think the 'studies done on infants' being referred to here might be the ones about recognizing emotions in faces. I'm surprised there haven't been any comments about that yet. I kinda expected comments after my last post. I still think that emotions are the closest thing we have to a human instinct - any reasons why they're not instinctual?