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Cogito

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Everything posted by Cogito

  1. I think, in general (though not at all without exception), all life is a lot more meaningful to Objectivists than to non-philosophic people.
  2. So an action (tax evasion) is immoral unless you can convince the collective consciousness to allow you to commit it?
  3. While I'm not much of a gamer or anything, a lot of what I want to do with my life will start in the videogame industry (things like neuron impulses being read by a comp chip to send output to a computer or visual input being sent directly to the visual cortex).
  4. The gunman is not the enforcer of a just, rights based law, but he is the enforcer of the law of "might makes right". That is the exact law the IRS enforces when they prosecute a tax evader.
  5. Neither, in that sense, is the IRS.
  6. But why do you owe the enforcers of unjust laws the choice of complying or fighting on an ideological level? To reuse a favorite example of mine, if a gunman comes to your house and holds a gun to your head asking where your kids are, do you owe him to choose between complying (giving up the location of your children) or fighting ideologically (trying to convince him he has no right to your children and then letting yourself get shot)? Can't you be disobedient (tell him the kids are at a friend's house)?
  7. And if the law is so non-objective (like the tax code) that it is impossible to know if you're breaking it? Have you made a contract in restraint of trade recently? Even ignoring the problem of non-objective law, why is there any obligation to fight ideologically when there is a gun to your head? You can't use your mind to convince someone who wants you to abandon your mind. Would you rather Bobsponge simply give himself up and go to jail? Hey Mr. Robber, you have no right to my wallet but because you have a big gang behind you, I'm going to say you have no right and let you shoot me instead of saying you have no right and hiding my wallet. Selective compliance doesn't undermine the integrity of the legal system, selective justice of the legal system undermines its integrity.
  8. There is a huge difference between tax evasion and steriods in MLB. If Bonds takes a principled stand, he could get kicked out of the MLB, which is the MLB's right because Bonds doesn't own it. If Bobsponge makes a principled stand, he could get kicked out of life which is not the government's right because Bobsponge does own it. It's the difference of lying to gain a value and lying to avoid having a value of your destroyed by someone who doesn't have the right to do so. To put it another way, if a gunman comes to your house and asks you where your children are, is it being dishonest to tell him that they are at a friend's house instead of in the kitchen, where they really are?
  9. Can you give some examples?
  10. I think you missed part of your sentence here, I'm not completely sure what you're trying to say. All I was saying is that if someone decides to sell or give away his writing, he can do so under his conditions. If he chooses to publish with a company that he doesn't own, his conditions have to meet theirs (so when I "sell" my post to this forum, I have to meet its conditions, including letting my posts be quoted). My comment was in response to Antonio claiming that the fact of selling a book means that the seller loses full rights to his writing even if there were conditions to the contrary.
  11. No, because I posted it on a forum owned by someone else who has rules that allows for quoting.
  12. This seems to suggest that you can change your name... Not that I want to (I came up with the nick Cogito when I signed up for the site and have been using it everywhere ever since), but how would you go about doing this?
  13. Hey all, A good friend of mine is seriously considering majoring in philosophy in college, and asked me if I knew of any schools with good philosophy departments. He's not an Objectivist (yet, he hasn't had time to read any of the books I'm so eager to lend him, being a Junior in high school), so I can't expect him to accept something like Founder's College (which I'm not even convinced is the best choice), but he is a brilliant, rational guy and I'd hate to see his mind destroyed by modern philosophy. Are there any schools out there with good philosophy departments? This kid is the kind who, if introduced to the right ideas, could become a vital part of the inellectual revolution America so sorely needs (He wants to be a professor). Thanks, Cogito P.S. We've recently been having sporadic philosophical discussions, and when I brought up metaphysics and the various views on it, he seemed most interested in an objective metaphysics.
  14. I think people are missing something here, because this seems a no-brainer... AFAIK (and if I'm wrong, then I'm the one missing something here) HD-DVD technology is a privately owned, patented format. Now, if Disney decides that they want to put Lion King 3.14159 out in HD-DVD format, they have to do so under the terms of whoever owns the format (I believe Toshiba). Similarly, and more importantly, the code to decode (weird phrase) is also owned by whoever owns the format, and therefore to create a device which can read the HD-DVDs one needs the permission of the owner of the format, who have their rules. I don't see any problem here, unless those rules are proscribed by Big Brother.
  15. Yes, how dare they claim that they are the sole owners of their works and that you can't do whatever you want without their permission.
  16. The Hebrew of that verse is : וַיֹּ֙סֶף֙ אַף־יְהוָ֔ה לַחֲרֹ֖ות בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וַיָּ֨סֶת אֶת־דָּוִ֤ד בָּהֶם֙ לֵאמֹ֔ר לֵ֛ךְ מְנֵ֥ה אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל וְאֶת־יְהוּדָֽה׃ (Bold and size added) The subject there is clearly Yahweh, the specific name for the OT god of the Hebrews(as opposed to elohim or el, which could be twisted to mean some other god) Edit: after a quick re-read, I realized that I made a small, yet possibly essential error. The subject of the first part of the sentence is "the nose of yahweh", as in: and it was that the nose of yahweh increased to flare against Israel (the weird figure of speech the bible uses to say "god got mad"). While this may seem a small difference, the subject of the whole sentence is god's nose, meaning it was the nose that told David to take a census.
  17. I'm thinking this is bordering on the fallacy of the borderline case. Just because a choice has to be made and there is an acceptable range for that choice doesn't mean the choice is arbitrary. No, because this obligation applies to physically independent, living beings with a developing rational consciousness You can't. You can, however, tell him specific, concrete things he can and cannot do (and as his consciousness develops, you can get more abstract), and he's likely to listen to you in the younger years (for some obvious evolutionary reasons, children automatically listen to a lot of what their parents say up to a certain point).
  18. AFAIK, the only things it doesn't have are: as-yet unpublished materials (duh), The Early Ayn Rand, and the articles in her various books that weren't by her or Dr. Peikoff (such as the Greenspan articles in C:UI) . I strongly recommend this resource, it is worth twice its price.
  19. Assuming he's being sarcastic, I agree with our prudent predator here. I've never understood why the government should be allowed to run a lottery. I mean, if an individual (even one associated with the government) wants to start a private lottery and give all or some of the proceeds to the government, fine, but why should the government run a lottery... And now that I'm writing about it outloud (yeah that didn't make sense), what's the difference between a government run industry and an industry run by a private individual if the government run industry doesn't use force to keep itself in power and doesn't fund itself through force (i.e. taxation)?
  20. First, it's Objectivism, not objectivism. Read the Forum Rules. In response to what you wrote, how would you propose to go about producing a society of Objectivism? I'd say the best way would be to change the mainstream philosophy, making it tend towards Objectivism. How do you do that? Produce books (and lectures, etc.) on Objectivism.
  21. I guess the reason I ask is because my whole life I've been surrounded by people telling me to never forget and to experience the holocaust and all that, I go to a school that goes to the holocaust museum once every two years and we have a required semester class devoted solely to the holocaust and there is a two-week tour of concentration camps in Poland during senior year, and every time we go to the museum or get into an in depth discussion I start feeling a terrible pain for all the senseless loss and I really don't understand why it should be such a big part of anyone's life.
  22. In my school, the whole school is papered over black, various quotes are put up all over the walls and read in place of bells, there's a 24 hour vigil going on all school day where they read off the names of people who died in camps, most classes devote a lot of time to talking about the horrors, and there's a huge assembly at the end of the day where they bring in survivors and make sure everyone is very, very sad... But there's no talk of causes, just of horrors.
  23. I've had that question many times since reading AS... Why stick around? We don't need them. I'm with you, Bob.
  24. Today is the official Holocaust Remembrance Day. This brings up a question I often struggle with: is there room in life for remembering/dwelling on huge negative events beyond what is necessary to learn not to repeat the actions of the evil? In the Jewish community, this day is held as a day to remember and experience the horrors that were experienced in the holocaust, and when I walk through my (Jewish) school on this day each year, I almost always end up getting sick to my stomach. Is there a rational value in this kind of remembrance?
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