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Leonid

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Everything posted by Leonid

  1. That of course depends on context. Sometime it takes time to realize that relations became sacrificial. But the moment one understands that he should rather terminate them. if relations are still valuable, then there is a fair trade, but maybe on the smaller scale.
  2. The evidence that capitalism brings prosperity and communism only misery and poverty is all around us and well recorded in the history of 20th century. If reality cannot persuade them, nothing will. The problem is that they are not after prosperity but after equality, and to achieve this they would turn everybody to dispossessed. As for the question of social responsibility, it has to be confronted on the moral ground of rational egoism. They have to be explained once and for all why nobody owns them their life, that they have no claim on the life of other people and if they want help they may have it as a charity, not as a right and only those who deserve it.
  3. Leonid

    Love in AS

    Not at all. Where did you find a negative view of sex in this quote? Rand is talking about Platonic love which is not anti but rather asexual. Rand compares platonic love with an idea unexpressed in action and this is a situation in which we find for example Franscisco. When he meets Dagny in the Galt Gulch he confesses to her that he loves her and always will, in spite he knows that she is in love with Galt and he would never be able to consummate his love. Galt from the other hand was in love with Dagny for years without any hope not only to have sex with her but simply meet her. To have a glance on her he had to stalk her. He could die without meeting Dagny. Yet he was deeply in love with her. This is Platonic love. More then that, for Rand love is an emotional response to other person's values. Sexual desire is a result of such a response. There could be many situations in which sexual relations are impossible and love is unexpressed in action, but it still love nevertheless.
  4. Leonid

    Love in AS

    Just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love... “The Meaning of Sex,” For the New Intellectual, 100 Yet John Galt was in love with Dagny for many years before he could consummate it. And Franscisco was in love with Dagny for years after he decided to end their physical relationships. Does it make them contemptible hypocrites?
  5. "I'd say: Your products are a necessary evil, but we all use it, we all partake in it, we all enjoy it." And I'd say-you are unnecessary evil and I don't want you as my customer.
  6. Friendship is a trade in spiritual values. Like any trade its purpose is a mutual benefit. When one of the partners get less than he gives, the trade becomes a sacrifice. Such a "friendship" better to terminate straight away.
  7. Not as long as they they control State treasure and get their share from the mining industry. They are Mafia-style government, and mafia never wanted to control people minds, or to restrict them in any way as long as they pay. ANC will never allow nationalization, they not so stupid to kill a goose which lays the golden eggs.
  8. Lust they have, power-no, like any impotent. They can talk high-brow English about doing good for the people, but unable to maintain traffic lights, let alone any form of dictatorship.They are simply bunch of buffoons, which The People ignore or laugh on them. Watch the last DVD of Trevor Noah. He openly calls President Zuma a thief.
  9. Tony, government in principle cannot deliver social services as it promises during each and every election. The reason for it is that such a delivery requires production which is a realm of mind. Government is a tool of coercion. However it seems that there no way to prevent government from the intervention in production and distribution of wealth. In South African context I can see only one solution. Since current ANC government is inherently corrupted and represents a new socio-economic system which could be called cleptocracy, we should vote them into the power and let them steal public funds on one condition-they shouldn't do anything else. They should keep their hands off from any enterprise, which they do anyway by default. In such a situation people slowly but surly will become self-sufficient.
  10. This is true. ANC didn't change much in the country macro-economics. The same large parastatal companies which apartheid created and the mining crony "capitalist" industry run business as usual. But there are differences. First, all cronies became blacks thanks to the policy of BEE ( Black economic empowerment). The rate which ANC produces black billionaires is unprecedented. The level of incompetence and corruption in all fields of government's enterprise is also unprecedented thanks to affirmative action. As one of the ANC affiliated fat cats said-I didn't go to the struggle to be poor. From the other hand, the spirit of entrepreneurship of the black people has been released. There are myriads half-formal and informal mini and micro businesses around. Another unexpected result-since government services are crumbling, people develop alternatives-private schools and colleges often without licence, health services, private security etc..,South Africa de facto is becoming a libertarian state. There is a lot of resentment of ANC and in fact a passive civil disobedience-only 12 % of the people pay traffic fines. The minor issue of toll gates caused a great uproar and united such political powers which usually are arch-enemies, like ANC affiliated trade unions and Democratic Alliance. There are many things happening in today's South Africa, for the better and worse. And all this started by one man-Nelson Mandela. May he rest in peace.
  11. Everybody who tries to fit Mandela into the scheme " Saint-Devil" is doomed to fail. He was a visionary, a revolutionary. a fighter against a great injustice which apartheid was. His means not always fitted the ends. In 1963 he was an angry 45 years old who went into the prison. In 1990 he reappeared as 72 years old mature statesman with the vision of reconciliation and non-racial South Africa. But there were nobody in his own party to share his vision. He could fight apartheid and win but he couldn't fight his own party, ANC, which for him was much more then just a political affiliation. It was his home and his church. He refused to contest for the second presidential term ( an unique event in Africa and in the world) and left politics in 1998, putting an insignificant nobody as a president instead. Then he went out of public life and practically secluded himself. There were a lot of charitable activities in Mandela's name, but he himself wasn't around. His legacy died long before him.
  12. This is the one of points, the minor one. The whole religious part of the movie and the book is rather humorous. The boy is an adept of 3 mayor religions-Christianity, Islam and Hinduism and he is rejected by all three.
  13. No, Free will doesn't require proof in the sense of chain of logical conclusions based on observation. It's a first person self-evident experience. However it's possible to bring up an ostensive proof, which I did.
  14. Thank you for your input. I brought up this topic in order to highlight certain points. 1.Animals have concrete-bound volition. 2.Animals unable to make a random choice because randomness is a high-level concept and animals don't have conceptual cognition. 3. Only humans possess such a quality and that how their volition differs from that of animals. 4. Free will is volition on conceptual level. 5. The ability of the random choice is a proof of Free Will. I expected you to address these points. Instead people choose to criticize the experiment itself. It's like to criticize Ayn Rand indestructible robot thought experiment on the grounds that such a robot is physically and even metaphysically impossible. I must confess that I'm disappointed.
  15. The whole point is that donkey couldn't flip the coin. That would be an arbitrary decision which involves Free will which donkey doesn't have. And why he should walk right? The previous participant suggested left.
  16. I observed a cat who had a difficulty to choose between 2 identical bowls of food. He was constantly moving from one to another. Not to mention a woman who has to choose a dress.
  17. In reality a donkey will wait till situation changes in such a way that he could make a choice, for example the wind will blow in certain direction. The point which experiment highlights, however, is different. It comes to show that animals cannot to make a random choice but human can and this is the difference between animal volition and human Free Will.
  18. The shirt experiment shows ability of subjective choice. There is no rational reason to choose between identical shirts, only gut feeling. As for the animal experiments, I don't know whether or not these experiments really created completely identical values. Most probably not, it's very difficult to arrange such a set in the real life. That why a need for the thought experiment. Animals act toward preservation of life, but they don't know that. instinctively they choose a value that is most suitable for such a goal. But in the case that all values are equal and no choice is possible instinct could fail, but mind not. However more often than not man also could stuck in the position of indecision, when he doesn't have a sufficient information to decide or presented with too many alternatives which all seem equal.
  19. If a boy sublimated himself into the tiger, then this is story about that one could struggle and defeat his own fears. If he really had to face the tiger, which represents the existential threat and learn not only how to live with it but to turn it to his survival advantage, then the story has deep philosophical implications. That why I love the second version more than first.
  20. Choice by definition is a selection between at least two alternatives. To talk about choice in the absence of alternative when all values are equal is contradiction in terms. Animals essentially are very complicated computers and at least theoretically could face a halting problem, provided that experiment eliminates all biases.They cannot reason and to connect a choice between two identical stacks of hay with the life-death alternative and therefore the referral to the ultimate choice is irrelevant. They also cannot go by the rule of thumb, which would be a rational decision in such a case. But man could and would. The experiment demonstrates the difference between animal ability to choose which I call animal volition for the want of the better term and man's Free Will. Only man is able to make a random, arbitrary or subjective choice like in the experiment with the shirts. It also demonstrates that man's Free Will didn't appear by some kind of magic out of the thin air. It represents the evolutionary development of the animal volition on the new cognitive level of self-awareness. Paraphrasing Ayn Rand, to say " I want X" one should be able first to say "I". Since an ass cannot do that he may stuck forever. This is a demonstration of the evolutionary advantage of Free Will over animal hard wired volition. The price which we pay for this advantage is of course that we can make suicidal choices against our best interests and life itself. We can choose any standard of value, including death. We could make random choices in the face of the real alternatives. We could choose not to think and became lower than animals. And for the proof read any newspaper or watch any TV news.
  21. What do you think about philosophical premises of this movie?
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