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Tenzing_Shaw

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Everything posted by Tenzing_Shaw

  1. I definitely support your idea, and would seriously consider moving to Iceland if this system were implemented, and I could pay the fee. I have signed up for your group on Facebook, although I am not sure what this accomplishes other than a token gesture of support, as I have no power to affect the situation in Iceland. I certainly wish you the best of luck in spreading your idea. Could you give us some indication of how much support this idea has at the moment (sorry if you have said already, and I missed it)? Is it just you and some friends, or have you been able to inform a significant number of people? That being said, I think Zip has a point. What do you hope to gain by convincing people outside of Iceland of your idea? You said that the population of Iceland is around 300,000. Given that, your task may not be hopeless. Shouldn't you be focusing on convincing them, however, instead of us? Or have you been; and if so, what measures have you taken?
  2. I don't know how good of an example this is. It seems to me that the "criminal" here acted morally after a failure of the state to protect rights: there was objective evidence of imminent danger to his loved-one and the police would not take action. Assuming that the given article has reported the situation objectively, I have no problem with this man's action, and I think the only thing he did wrong was to get caught. I do find your question about parole interesting, and I am not sure what the correct answer is.
  3. Well, first of all... 100 billion - ~6 billion * 1 million != 460 billion
  4. The law of supply and demand assumes a market in which buyers and sellers can interact freely (i.e. a free market). The presence of U.S. drug laws on one side and criminal cartels on the other introduces coercion, meaning that this condition isn't satisfied. Concretely, I don't see how the new entrants in the market would be able to sell to users across the border. Crossing the border with drugs would remain a very dangerous activity, requiring resources and planning (this is no doubt one reason that the cartels emerged in the first place). Also, as Hotu Matua said, the cartels have committed numerous crimes. The proper way to deal with criminals is by using force, not by counting on economics to make them give up crime. Legalizing drugs might prevent this situation from recurring, but it is an insufficient measure in the present.
  5. So the idea is that these other producers would bypass the cartels and sell directly to "distributors" in America? As long as the cartels have a strong presence in border towns, and as long as most of the "distributors" are hardened criminals, I have a hard time seeing how this would happen.
  6. Let's assume that Mexico legalized drugs (in other words, the production and consumption of drugs within its borders). How would this change the situation? You would still have the same cartels fighting over the same market. They would have no reason to stop using violence against one another, and non-criminal competitors would be unable to enter the market for fear of retribution. Given the current situation, in other words, I think that all-out war against the cartels is the only solution. This should be accompanied with or followed by the legalization of drugs. Perhaps the government could start out by granting "licenses" to produce drugs to any would-be non-criminal competitors and then giving them (and their suppliers) police protection. In other words, while I would agree with you that Mexican drug laws have been a major cause of the situation (and that my first post was inaccurate in that sense), this does not change the reality that the cartels exist and need to be eliminated by force.
  7. It is drug laws in the United States that have made this situation possible, since that is where the market is. The Mexican government cannot control those laws. Also, the drug cartels are vicious gangs of killers which threaten to reduce some regions to a state of near anarchy. Therefore, the Mexican government must do everything in its power to wipe out the cartels and maintain law and order. Deploying the military to affected cities seems like a good first step; I would think, however, that a more aggressive approach would be warranted (i.e. actively seeking out and eliminating members of the cartels and destroying their property; I don't know how much of this is being done already). The best approach for the United States would be to legalize drugs here, while at the same time giving military aid to Mexico in order to destroy the cartels (since the security of U.S. border towns is also threatened). I would also say that the Mexican government should legalize drugs, but perhaps only after the major cartels have been eliminated. In the mean time, it is safe to assume that most drug-related activity in Mexico is connected with other, more serious crimes; also, I think the current situation qualifies as an emergency. Morally, I would also put a lot of blame on buyers of illegal drugs in the United States, who are content with (or evade) the fact that they are financing murderous thugs across the border.
  8. If by ambiguity you simply mean that one aspect of a piece can be understood in more than one way, then ambiguity certainly has value, provided that it contributes to the theme of the piece. In order for this to be the case, I think that the alternate meanings conveyed must be objectively clear, and must be logically consistent with one another. If, for example, it is unclear whether a character in a story is a hero or a villain, until the later when it is revealed that the character's "evil" actions were actually good in light of new information (take for example Francisco D'Anconia), then this type of ambiguity is rational, and can be very effective. If (as is common in modern stories) the moral worth of the character is never clarified, and one gets the impression that the author himself didn't know what to think, then this type of ambiguity is irrational, and should not be included in art. I think that one could say the same thing about mystery. Mystery can be rational when it serves a specific purpose, when it is clear that there is an objective answer to the mystery, and/or when the solution to the mystery is revealed by the artist at a later time or (in the case of visual art) by a specific aspect of the work (there are many examples of this in Atlas Shrugged). So, to make more precise what I have said previously, ambiguity and mystery in art must be used in a logically consistent way, without any mystical features, and should not be used for their own sake; they should serve a clear purpose in the work. Would you agree with this formulation?
  9. Hey tenzing, here is a funny article that has something to do with extra creamy stuffs: http://forum.objectivismonline.net/index.php?showtopic=17829

  10. Yang and I were both electrical engineering students at UIUC. He is about a fourth of the way through Atlas Shrugged at the moment, and is listening (along with me) to an audio-book version of The Fountainhead.
  11. To be clear, I do not believe that the degree of realism determines the quality of a work of art. I was primarily trying to provide an example of a point I made in my post, which is that art should not attempt to hide its content from the viewer (or reader, or listener). This seems clear to me, because art should strive to convey meaning as effectively as possible, and I do not know of a rational justification for including occlusion in a work of art. Perhaps the essence of the issue is that I do not consider "mystery" or "ambiguity" to have aesthetic value. I am reminded of a quote by Richard Feynman: As I see it, the point Feynman was trying to make is that clarity of perception and understanding do not detract from beauty; and can greatly add to it. In your work, I see an attempt to make content less clear, and this is what I object to. Although I like the sense of life I see in some of your works (Inkling, in particular), and certainly prefer them to works which portray ugliness with photographic precision, I do not understand why you choose to stray so far from a precise depiction of reality. Why not take the same sense of life, and express it more exactly? This does not entail attempting to make your paintings look like photographs. For example, Nick Gaetano's paintings certainly do not resemble photographs. What they do do is portray meaning with brilliant clarity, attempting to hide nothing from the viewer. I am certainly not suggesting that you copy either of the artists I mentioned (that is the last thing you should do). There are clearly innumerable ways to effectively convey meaning in visual art. Why not develop your style around this same goal?
  12. I absolutely agree with this. Many of these works appear to be stains which only vaguely connote real entities. I can't help but compare them to the works of Bryan Larsen which, though I know very little about artistic technique, appear to me to have required tremendous effort and talent to produce. They portray a brilliant sense of life, and combine the selectivity of art with realism approaching the quality of a photograph in many cases. Art should fearlessly convey meaning, not deliberately attempt to obscure it from the viewer using visual tricks and "hidden messages".
  13. I also agree, and I enjoyed the Lockitch video. Dr. Lockitch is certainly one of my favorite ARI speakers; I especially liked his essay The Real Meaning of Earth Hour.
  14. Sounds like an equivocation on the meaning of "sufficiently".
  15. Agreed. My point was that even if Tesla had only invented AC power distribution, for example, I would still call him one of the greatest inventors, based on the fundamental nature of this invention, and its incalculable impact on civilization.
  16. Surely the quality of inventions matters more than their quantity. In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt also was not portrayed as having made "a whole lot of things"; only a few great things.
  17. To criticize priests as such is not discrimination-not if discrimination is the process of making irrational generalizations based on unchosen traits (e.g. racism, nationalism, tribalism). People have free will, and can choose to become priests or not, and there is nothing discriminatory in condemning this choice. I believe that this is a dangerous package deal introduced by post-modern philosophy (multiculturalism in particular): the idea is to capitalize on the widespread (and rational) rejection of racism in order to shield ideological movements (usually religions) from criticism. Thus, while one can argue with the rationality of condemning priesthood as such, one should not confuse this with collectivism.
  18. My apologies for not providing a link for the quotes I used in my previous post. Here it is: http://www.holoscience.com/synopsis.php?page=6
  19. Not only that, but consider statements such as "Bright stars like our Sun are great concentrated balls of lightning!" What is the precise definition of a "concentrated ball of lightning"? What experimental data or causal explanations make such a statement anything more than meaningless nonsense? What of the mountains of spectral evidence for the theory that stars are powered by nuclear reactions? One more example: "Stellar evolution theory and the age of stars is an elaborate fiction." Based on what evidence? What of the fact that stellar evolution theory explains and predicts the concentrations of different types of stars? Fortunately, we are told that "Stars behave as electrodes in a galactic glow discharge." Huh? I find this "theory" very similar to Creationism: it points out that there are problems with the existing theory, and uses this fact as a motivation for accepting an arbitrary alternative. Even if modern astrophysics has philosophical problems, it contains a tremendous amount of truth as well, and should not be dismissed so casually.
  20. His actual position makes reference to probability, and is therefore not the correct one at all. The Objectivist notion of certainty has nothing whatsoever to do with probability. Calling the existence of a god "highly improbable" is at once a capitulation to theism and an abuse of the concept of probability.
  21. Specific claims about the existence of god can be dismissed as impossible using reason (the word "god" has to be given a specific definition first). If the claims are vague and non-specific, then there is nothing to dismiss; no coherent statement has actually been made, and the proper response is to ignore the claims completely. Even seemingly specific claims (eg: "the world was created by a magical green elephant on mars") may fall into this category if they have no relation to reality at all; i.e. they actually don't mean anything. This is basically what Leonard Peikoff says about the issue in OPAR, in his discussion of theism, and the difference between the false and the arbitrary.
  22. I would also like to add that the concept of "probability" is used very freely by many modern intellectuals, who seem to think that invoking it makes their ideas more "precise" and "scientific". In fact, these invokations are often not valid at all. One example is when creationists argue that the existence of human life is "improbable" without a creator, as though one could assign a probability to a fact of reality. In the case in question here, we have people like Dawkins assigning probabilities to non-specific claims, in the absence of any evidence either way. This is a meaningless use of the concept of probability.
  23. There is a huge difference between the arbitrary and the highly improbable. What evidence do you have that "there probably is no god?" (which is a positive statement, and hence requires evidence). You are correct that the Christian God is impossible, given its usual definition. The other kind of "god" you mention is worse than impossible: it is nonsense. By this, I mean that when people say they believe in "a higher power" or some such vague thing, it literally does not mean anything at all; they may as well have uttered a series of unintelligible grunts. It is not possible to assign a probability to a statement that expresses no specific meaning (the most such a statement can express is a vague emotional connotation, which does not qualify as a specific meaning). When someone utters such a statement, the proper response is a mental "huh?", not a statement such as "that is probably false". What is "that"?
  24. Agreed; Heinlein's "corporal punishment philosophy" is completely irrational (just as irrational as the system he attacks).
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