Dismuke

Yes - in the overwhelming number of contexts, all one has to do in open ocean is cast one's net into the water and grab all he can. Is there a guarantee that one will actually catch fish - no, of course not. I never suggested there was. Clearly there is no guarantee of results. I am not sure where you got the idea I ever suggested that. The specific issue under discussion is a context where a great many people have their nets in the water and are so successful at catching a valuable species of fish that its population is taken out at a much faster rate than it can naturally replenish itself thereby leading to potential economic depletion or possibly even the very extinction of the species. Should that happen, there will be no fish left for anyone - and such a circumstance is a problem for obvious reasons. The fact that the problem in this oceanic context is not very conveniently and easily solved in the exact same manner and by the exact same laws and principles that are used to solve disputes on dry land where there are firmly fixed and defined real estate boundaries does NOT change the fact that the potential depletion and/or extinction of such fish IS a problem. If a problem or dispute arises in a totally new context of reality where existing laws and principles are not fully sufficient or applicable, it is NOT the task of reality to conform itself to our pre-existing principles. It is OUR task to find ways to either apply the old principles to the new context or, if that is not appropriate, to discover entirely new principles which are applicable. But I never put forth "freedom of action" as being some sort of "solution." You asked about the basis of one's right to attempt to acquire natural resources which currently do not exist as property. By "freedom of action" I simply meant that you have a legal right to do pretty much anything you want to do so long as you do not violate someone else's rights - and in the vast majority of contexts, taking ownership of unowned resources does NOT violate anyone's rights simply because nobody currently owns those resources. But if, based on a resource's metaphysical nature and the current limits of human knowledge and technology, that resource currently IS an unownable good - well, that is a fact of reality and, as such, it not only should be recognized, it MUST be recognized. The fact that someone might come along someday and find a way to make it ownable is purely hypothetical and utterly irrelevant to what actually is. Dealing with the facts of reality requires one to deal with what IS - not what might be, should be or ought to be. And exactly what happens if, based on the metaphysical nature of the resource and the existing limits of human knowledge, there currently does not exist any known way to define very specific and delimited rights of private property in the overall population of that resource? Does one, out of loyalty to that principle, simply deny that there is a problem and suggest that the resource might not be so important and that its possible extinction might not be such a horrible thing after all? Once again, it is not the task of reality to conform to our principles. I am afraid it is exactly the other way around. If, in the task of having to deal with what is one finds that one's principle is only applicable in terms of what ought to be - well, that is a strong sign that one might need to check his premises and either find a way to revise the principle so that is applicable to the context at hand or find some other principle that does take full cognizance of all aspects of that context. I will attempt to concretize my above points by way of an example. Let's suppose that scientists suddenly discover that a substance in the ground-up bones of a somewhat rare species of fish - we will call it the prontofish - works as a cure for a very deadly disease. Let's also suppose that the prontofish is the only known source of this substance and all efforts to try and create a synthetic substitute have so far failed. We will also suppose that every attempt to breed or move the fish outside its natural habitat has ended in dismal failure. Every time someone has attempted to move the fish elsewhere it soon dies. Furthermore, let us say that the entire known population of prontofish in the world is somewhere around 40,000 fish. At the rate that the fish breed in their natural habitat, scientists have determined that no more than 25% of the population, or 10,000 fish, can be captured each year without jeopardizing the species' ability to survive and replenish itself thereby assuring a continuous future supply of the lifesaving medicine. Now let's say that, because of the widespread nature of the disease, it would take around 250,000 fish per year to fully meet the demand that exists for the medicine. Obviously, since there are only 40,000 such fish in existence and only 10,000 of them can be responsibly captured each year, the price of that medicine is going to be VERY high and only the extremely wealthy will be able to afford it. If someone were to somehow capture all 40,000 fish, they would be able to find an immediate market for them at very high prices because the demand is larger than the supply. If that meant that the extinction of the species, would that be a problem? OF COURSE it would be a problem because a wonderful, lifesaving cure which once did exist no longer will exist. It would be a huge tragedy if such a species of fish went extinct - not because the fish no longer exist but because the people that future generations of the fish could have saved will not be saved and will die. In a context where there are full and clearly defined property rights - for example, if the entire population of the fish lived in a privately owned natural lake - there would be very little danger that the extinction of such a valuable species of fish would be allowed to happen. Even if the owner of the lake had a sudden need to raise cash quickly, he would still have zero incentive to sell the entire supply of fish all at once in order to raise a quick buck. Since the fish population, if managed responsibly, is capable of yielding 10,000 fish per year, it would only take 5 years of responsible management to yield a greater return than irresponsibly selling all of the fish at once. For that reason, if the current owner of the lake had an immediate need to raise as much cash as possible, he would get a MUCH larger sum of money by selling the lake to someone who was prepared to invest in it in the long run than he would by selling off all the fish. This is a prefect example of why, whenever it is at all possible, natural resources SHOULD be private property. The exploitation of all natural resources, especially self-renewing natural resources such as plants and animals, needs to be actively managed. Under a system of private property, the laws of supply and demand will ensure that the resource is actively managed in the most efficient and responsible manner possible. Unfortunately, however, in our hypothetical example, the prontofish does NOT live in a privately owned lake. It exists only in the open ocean. Furthermore, it does not remain within a limited geographical area thereby making it impossible to erect fences or find some way to grant legal title to just the specific section of ocean in which the fish live. The prontofish swims to a northern climate at the end of winter to breed and hatch offspring and, at the end of summer, swims back thousands of miles to a much warmer climate. For reasons that have already been mentioned, it would be highly desirable if the entire population of living prontofish could somehow become private property. But how does one accomplish that? And, once one determines how, by what method is one to determine exactly who has the moral right to be that property owner - keeping in mind that there are a great many people who would like to own the fish? One can go on and on about how their ought to be a way for people to raise prontofish in captivity on private farms. But the reality of the situation is there isn't such a way. Prontofish die when they are removed from their natural habitat - and that is a fact that people have to acknowledge and deal with. One can go on and on about how their ought to be a way to find some other source for the lifesaving medicine other than the prontofish - but there isn't such a way, which is a fact of reality that has to be acknowledged and dealt with. There is another fact of reality in this example that one must acknowledge and deal with - prontofish are not very smart and are pretty easy to capture. And, because of the high demand for the medicine, the going market rate for a single prontofish is currently near a thousand dollars. Because of that, a great many fishermen and even people who merely own recreational boats, are out on the ocean trying to catch prontofish - so many people that there is a very real danger the fish will become nearly extinct in less than a year. Is this a problem? Of course it is a problem - a lifesaving medicine is in very real danger of disappearing from the market for good. Why is there a problem? Because the lack of property rights in the open ocean make it impossible for the population of this very important species of fish to be responsibly managed in such a way to meet the long term market demand. Because nobody owns the ocean and nobody owns the uncaptured fish that are in it, anybody who wants to has an equally valid right to go out and try to catch prontofish - and they are doing just that. As a result of this lack of property rights, there is a disincentive for the population of fish to be responsibly managed. Because the supply is limited and because there are lots of people trying to catch the fish, the logical, and completely understandable mindset of a great many fishermen is going to be: "catch as many as you can before someone else catches them." Basically what we have here is a private dispute between two camps of people who have in interest in capturing and using the fish. One camp in the dispute wants enough prontofish to remain in the wild each year so that they will be able to continue capturing prontofish year after year into the future. Would you say that the position of this camp is reasonable and rational? Of course it is. The other camp in the dispute wants to catch as many fish as they can so they can enjoy the wonderful things that they can buy with the money they will get from the fish. Would you say that the position of this camp is reasonable and rational? Of course it is. The problem, however, is both positions are irreconcilable. Either everyone gets to catch as many prontofish as they possibly can - or they can leave enough to ensure a supply next year. One may suggest that their ought to be some other alternative - but the reality is that there isn't. How are the two sides to resolve their dispute short of resorting to force? They call in the government. Resolving private disputes - especially disputes over matters relating to rights of property - is the one of the central functions of a proper government. In this instance, it is NOT the proper function of the government to somehow nationalize the prontofish population. Nor is it the proper function of the government to pick some politician's favorite deep-pocketed corporation as the sole owner of prontofish. The proper function of government is to identify and protect the rights of all persons who wish to acquire prontofish in exactly the same way it was the proper function of government to identify and protect the rights of all persons who wished to acquire land on the unowned open wilderness of the Old West. Obviously, the most desirable thing the government could do is come up with some innovative and objectively valid way of placing the entire uncaptured prontofish population in the ocean under private ownership. If it is unable to find a way do so, then the next best thing would be to find an objectively valid process of effectively "homesteading" out the individual fish - i.e. to provide a legal process by which people may acquire property rights in prontofish by means of capturing them. And when coming up with such a process, it would be entirely reasonable and rational for the government to take cognizance of the metaphysical nature of prontofish and the conditions required for their continued survival and "homestead" out the capture of prontofish at the rate of 10,000 fish per year thereby ensuring a permanent supply. Rights are contextual. The rules and principles to determine what a person's rights are in one unique context may not necessarily be applicable to determining what they are in some other context. That is why there is an entire field of highly specialized study devoted exclusively to identifying how rights apply to an infinitely wide variety of contexts: law. In law, philosophy and in life the proper starting point is NOT "what principles happen to be applicable here?" The proper starting point is always: What are the relevant facts of reality? Imagine if, back when the government started to identify and define rights in the realm of intellectual productivity and in things such as radio frequencies, someone objected to the "creation" of these "new" rights on the basis of the principle that property rights can only exist in physical things. We would, of course, consider such a notion absurd. Sure, property rights can and do exist in physical things. But they can also exist in other contexts as well. Rights are applicable and essential in any realm of endeavor where it is necessary to interact with other human beings. Since individuals can and do interact with each other on the open ocean and when they acquire resources such as ocean fish or transient wildlife, it is necessary for the specific rights of all parties in such contexts to be identified and defined accordingly. And there is only one institution that can properly identify and protect those rights: government. To suggest that it is not possible or proper for the government to define and enforce individual rights in the realm of ocean fish and transient wildlife on grounds that such creatures are not domesticated on clearly demarcated plots of real estate is just as bizarre and invalid as it is to suggest that it is not possible or proper for the government to define and enforce individual rights in the realm of radio frequencies on grounds that it is impossible to physically touch, feel or smell the frequency. Both are examples of holding certain principles as out-of-context absolutes thereby blinding one to unique and different contexts and highly relevant facts of reality.

Basically, there are two unique types of rights under discussion here. The first involves the right of title which one has to one's property. That right is derived from whatever means one rightfully acquired the property - be it purchase, homesteading or gift. Ultimately, that right of title is derived from the effort that was put forth by the very first person who undertook the steps necessary to morally and legally transform that property from its generic, unowned natural state into a specific asset of private property. There is no title to transient wildlife - it is merely something which exists. The right to potentially acquire such transient wildlife is not a right of title but rather a freedom of action - much in the same way that you have a right to speak your mind or to move from one area of the country to another. The moral basis of this is the fact that you have a political right to do anything you like so long as it does not in some way violate the rights of another. In this case, since wildlife and other unowned natural phenomena are owned by nobody, its transformation into private property, in and of itself, does not violate anyone's rights. Indeed, the transformation of such phenomena into private property is a highly desirable state of affairs - and, for that reason, that transformation has already happened with most economically desirable resources. Now, the right of any given individual to potentially acquire ownership to specific types of wildlife depends in large part on the context of the particular situation. For example, the right to potentially acquire ownership in a deer (I say "potentially" because one may not be successful in actually capturing or shooting the deer - there are lots of hunters who return empty handed) is something which is limited exclusively to the owners of the particular parcels of property that the deer roam across. If you don't own land or if deer never wander across your land, you miss out on this particular right. In the case of the wild ocean fish (as opposed to fish in oceanic fish farms) however, so long as you are willing to put in the effort and capital necessary to acquire a boat and the proper equipment, you have the exact same right to go out and attempt to catch fish as does anyone else. Because nobody owns the ocean or the fish that is in it, there is no basis at all for any one person to somehow claim that he has a greater right to fish in it than does another. Because most examples of unowned natural phenomena exist in such a state due to the fact that they have zero economic value or are a disvalue, there is little if any need for the legal system to become involved. If you are enjoying barbecue as a guest in a friend's backyard and a mosquito lands on your arm, you are not going to ask your host: "Do I have permission to swat and kill your mosquito?" You are just going to kill the thing. And if an animal rights activist tried to sue you because you killed such a mosquito while you were a guest on his property - well, even today's courts would probably laugh it out of the building. Absolutely - and such self-renewing populations should exist as private property whenever possible, as for example, is currently the case with the horse, cattle, pig, goat, chicken, cat and dog populations in North America. The issue at hand, however, is that there are certain contexts in which desirable self-renewing populations, by their very metaphysical nature, either do or or always will exist in a wild and not a domesticated state. I agree completely - and that is exactly what I am arguing for. There needs to be a legal process by which persons who wish to do so can acquire ownership and property rights. In the vast majority of instances, the principle that, so long as one does not trespass on another's private property, if you can shoot it, capture it or tame it, it's yours, is more than sufficient. The only time there is any need for special legal consideration is when a potential dispute arises between individuals who all have a more or less identical moral and legal basis to exploit a limited, economically desirable self-renewing unowned population. Such disputes are relatively rare but can and do arise when desirable wildlife is in constant flux between parcels of property or, in the case of the ocean, where there are no property rights at all. When such disputes do arise, it is the proper role of government to step in and identify and define the specific rights of each party. Absent such a dispute, government involvement is unnecessary and undesirable. That is a strictly legal and not a philosophical question. The philosophical issue is the fact that human beings do have the right to transform unowned natural phenomena into private assets. The specific process by which such a transformation of any given example of natural phenomena takes place in order for a person to acquire a government recognized and enforced title to that asset and how potential disputes in this area are resolved is highly contextual and is a specialized legal issue.

I agree with the need to establish property rights in the ocean. And I believe that there is a proper role for government to play in such situations - and that role is centered around defining and protecting those property rights. Ownership of the airwaves is an excellent example for this sort of discussion. At one time, there was no need for property rights in the airwaves because, for a certain period after their existence was discovered they had zero economic value. Once commercial applications for their use came along, however, before such rights could be recognized two things had to happen: the boundaries of exactly where such rights started and ended had to be defined and a process had to be put in place by which individuals could properly and legally acquire such rights. Part of the government's proper function of protecting individual rights is to define such boundaries and implement such processes. In the case of airwaves, defining the specific boundaries of the rights involved meant dividing the broadcast spectrum up into specific and legally defined frequencies. It also meant establishing specific boundaries in terms of how powerful of a signal individual stations could transmit so as not to interfere with other stations in different regions of the country which were also broadcasting on the exact same frequency. In other words, it meant that one's property rights in a radio station was a property right to something specific - a right to broadcast over a specific frequency on the dial up to a specific level of signal strength. Those who emit signals which interfere with that radio station's signal are, thereby, guilty of violating the station owner's property rights. As for the process of acquiring the rights - i.e. acquiring a legally recognized title to a specific frequency in a specific geographical region - the model that was imperfectly implemented in the US was somewhat along the lines of homesteading, which I think is the most rational way of dong it. What would NOT be a valid model would be for some person to arbitrarily come along and claim "Gee, I am asserting my claim to ownership of this frequency and that frequency - and I expect the government to enforce it on that basis." In a free society, rights are not arbitrary and cannot be established by mere assertion - the original claim to the property must be earned through some sort of creative and or productive process. On that basis, the proper method of acquiring ownership in a previously unowned frequency would require one to actively and continuously use the frequency one wishes to establish a claim over. After a certain passage of time the law would recognize that the operators have created a viable asset and would give full legal recognition of the rights that the creators of that asset have properly earned and it becomes theirs to do with and dispose of as they see fit. Prior to that passage of time, however, should the station go "dark" for a prolonged period of time, the government would consider the operators as having abandoned their claim to that frequency meaning that anyone else wishing to do so is free to come along and put in the necessary effort to transform that specific unowned and previously valueless spectrum of natural phenomena into an asset. In doing so, the new operators would be establishing their moral and legal right to that asset which is the government's responsibility to recognize and defend. Getting back to the ocean - a similar pattern would be applicable. A person cannot properly come along and merely assert ownership over so many square miles of the ocean. By what right can any person make such a claim? What did person do to actually earn such a right? Merely asset that he has it? That's not good enough - and it is totally arbitrary. Property rights are derived from the fact that one has a right to one's own time, creativity and effort and the product of one's creativity and effort - and it is only through a process of creativity and/or effort that title to previously unowned entities can be morally acquired. Furthermore, in the case of the ocean, any property rights one wishes to claim must be the rights to something specific. For example, the right to fish in certain waters, the right to extract mineral wealth in certain parts of the ocean, etc. For example, let's assume I invent some sort of machinery capable of mining gold and silver from the bottom of the ocean along with remote controlled underwater robots capable of operating the machinery. Under a rational legal system, all I would need to do is file a claim with the government my intention to mine in a certain unowned portion of the ocean. The government would give me a specific, previously established legally defined period of time for me to commence such mining operations during which the government would defend and enforce my rights to do so. If I fail to begin mining during this period of time, the government would regard my claim as being abandoned and will no longer recognize or enforce it. However, once I actually start mining, as the owner of my effort, I have a moral right to that asset of wealth which I have created and, as a result, a proper government would recognize and protect my ownership in that underwater mine. In the case of exclusive fishing rights over a certain geographical portion of the ocean - again, that is not something that a person can merely assert. Since it is not private property, anyone has the right to fish on the open ocean. In order to earn the right to exclusively fish a certain area, one must create some sort of asset thereby giving him a moral and legal claim over it. For example, if I discover an economically viable method of fish farming in the ocean, in order to actually implement it, it would be essential that I have property rights in my endeavor which will be defended by the government. If I decide to go out and breed and feed large quantities of a certain type of fish in a specific portion of the ocean - larger quantities than would normally exist under natural circumstances and I selectively bred the fish in order to make them more commercially desirable than run of the mill natural fish, I will have created through my own effort certain assets that I have a moral right to and I am the ONLY person who has a moral right to those assets. If such were to happen, it would be the proper function of government to recognize and enforce that right and, if necessary, update the laws in order to define and make provisions for such rights, including preventing others from fishing in those waters. Those are just a couple of examples of how property rights in the ocean can and, once there becomes an economic need for them, should be established. It is important to keep in mind, however, that such rights would NOT prevent boats from crossing over those portions of the ocean that a given person has a right to mine or fish any more than the fact that I own my house gives me a right to demand that American Airlines not fly over it. To assert a property right over the passage across a certain specific surface area of the ocean, I would have to somehow earn it. For example, I could properly demand that boats stay outside of a certain limited distance from my oil platform. Or, if I excavate a safe deep water passage through a very rocky and dangerous portion of shoreline that is convenient for ships to travel through, I would have a moral and legal basis to assert property rights over the channel and to charge whatever tolls I wish for passage through it. Now, in response to my posting where I asserted that, in order to protect the rights of neighboring property owners, there is a proper basis for a limitation on just now much economically valuable wildlife which temporarily enters my property I may properly hunt, Inspector wrote: The problem here is that the above does not take into consideration important matters of context. First, the example specifically deals with animals that have economic value on the basis of them being wild animals for which things such as fences are inapplicable. For example, a fence would be useless when it comes to wild turkeys and other birds - and since deer have limited or no value as domesticated animals that is not applicable either. Second, as far as acquiring a larger lot of property, the example I gave was already one where the owner of a relatively small lot killed off all of the deer from a much larger surrounding area by virtue of the fact that, over a period of time, all of the deer in the area eventually crossed it at least once. The specific context under discussion is exactly that of a situation where there are multiple property owners in relatively close proximity to one another. Sure, a larger lot would solve the problem - but that is not what is under discussion. The solution to this issue is not all that much different than the solution to the issue of how to acquire property rights over air waves or property rights over portions of the ocean. Who owns wildlife? Nobody does. By definition it is ownerless. People can and do own domestic animals because of the effort that went into domesticating and breeding them. People can and do own the land on which the wild life exists. If you acquire title to a certain plot of land either by purchase, homestead or gift, you own that property and everything which is physically attached to it - which includes buildings, rocks, plants, etc. Wildlife, however, is not specifically attached to a given piece of property. It is transient. If a bird lands on your next door neighbors' property, it is not his bird. It is just a bird. If it then flies over to your property, the ownership of the bird does not suddenly transfer from your neighbor to you. It is just a bird. As with property rights in anything else, acquiring ownership in wildlife requires the exertion of effort. Therefore, if you are hunting one your own property and shoot a bird, as a result of your effort, you have a right to its carcass. If you capture or tame a wild animal, then by virtue of your expenditure of effort, you have acquired a right to that animal. This I suspect is non-controversial with the participants in this thread. What is a matter of controversy here is whether there is a proper role of government. I say there is in certain delimited contexts. And that role is the same as it is in any other realm which involves transforming previously unowned natural phenomena into private property. As I mentioned at the beginning of this posting, that proper role of government consists of defining the specific boundaries of the property rights and establishing a process by which to legally acquire those rights. In cases where the wildlife has no economic value or is a disvalue, the situation is pretty straight forward: If a rat is on your property, you alone have the right to shoot it. For someone else to shoot it would involve them trespassing on your property. And because rats have no economic value, there is absolutely no basis to assume that destroying the rat will cause harm or damages to some other person. Likewise, while rabbits may have a marginal economic value to surrounding property owners, if one is digging up your vegetable garden, you have a right to take whatever steps are necessary to protect the hard work and money you put into that garden. In such instances, the only necessary role of government is to protect the property owner from those who would physically trespass onto the property itself - no wildlife specific consideration necessary. Where it is appropriate for the government to step in is when there exists a basis of potential dispute between neighboring landowners over their individual rights to acquire property rights in an economically valuable resource which, by its metaphysical nature is NOT fixed to any one given plot of land but rather is transient and in a constant state of flux between one plot of land and another. The arbitration of private disputes IS a proper function of government - and the only alternative is for people to settle such matters by force, which, of course, is totally unacceptable in a civilized society. Therefore, when such disputes arise, the government MUST step in, define the rights of all parties and enforce them accordingly. When the government does step in, it is necessary for it to take cognizance of the metaphysical nature of whatever it is that is the subject of dispute - i.e., the government must be sensitive to context. In this instance, the context consists of the fact that the dispute centers around a resource which IS metaphysically transient along with the fact that, while the resource is self-renewing, its continued replenishment and possibly its very existence will be jeopardized or destroyed if it is depleted below a certain point. Therefore, it would be entirely appropriate in the case of such a dispute for the government to recognize the unique context involved and determine that, if one of the landowners systematically depletes that transient resource below a certain point during the moments when it temporarily passes through his plot of land, it would constitute a violation of the rights of the neighboring property owners. The specific right that would be violated is NOT the neighbors' property rights in the transient wild animals. Nobody owns the wild animals so there are no property rights attached to them. What would be violated would be the neighbors' rights to potentially ACQUIRE property rights in a resource which is NOT permanently attached to any given plot of land but is instead metaphysically transient. Objectivism regards individual rights as absolutes. But they are not intrinsic absolutes - they are contextual absolutes. Your right to do what you please with your property and while you are on your property is absolute - but only so long as it does not result some form of physical force or damage to another's rights and property. Your right to the items which are permanently attached to your property is absolute - they are YOURS. Transient wild animals which are not unique to any single plot of land are NOT yours because they are NOT property and belong to NOBODY until someone either shoots, tames or captures the animal. One DOES have a right to shoot, tame and capture transient animals that temporarily enter one's property - but that right is contextual. The fact that the animals are NOT unique to one's own property and that one's neighbors possess the exact same right to shoot or capture those same animals when they are temporarily on THEIR property is a valid ground for potentially rational dispute between neighbors and is something that the law and government does need to take cognizance of. For it to do so is NOT an example of the government "owning" or "controlling" or even "regulating" wildlife. It is an example of the government arbitrating private disputes which is one of its legitimate functions. Along those same lines, while I don't necessarily agree with all of the specific arguments that Vladimir has made in order to put forth his case, I think his more fundamental point about over fishing has a great deal of merit. The situation is essentially the same as with wildlife and is merely complicated by the fact that there are no property rights at all in the ocean. In the example of over hunting wild animals, the dispute is between the rights of a rather limited number of property owners - those who don't own land have zero rights to shoot at the animals unless such a right is delegated to them by one of the property owners. In the ocean, however, anyone in the world, including you and me if we chose to do so, has just as much of a right to go out and fish in the ocean as does anyone else. The issue of over fishing is essentially a private dispute between a potentially very large number of fishermen. It is a dispute over exactly what are the boundaries of an individual fisherman's rights to fish in certain waters. Exactly who has a right to fish in the ocean? Anyone who wishes to do so. Why? Because the fish and the ocean belong to nobody - therefore anyone has the right to capture the fish. And when a fisherman captures a fish, it becomes his fish. None of this, of course, is under dispute. The dispute is over the question of whether a single fishermen or a small group of fishermen have the right to fish to such an extent that the supply becomes permanently depleted. In this case, I think the essential fact that must be taken into consideration is the metaphysical nature of the resource. Unlike mineral resources, fish and other ocean life are a self-renewing resource - so long as you do not capture too many, the fish that evade capture will have little baby fish thus ensuring a steady and permanent supply. In the case of an underwater mineral resource such as oil, it is entirely proper and moral to completely deplete the supply of oil if it makes economic sense to do so. The oil in a place such as the Gulf of Mexico exists in a finite quantity and we have absolutely no sacrificial duty to refrain from exhausting it so that some unspecified "future generation" can eventually exhaust it. A "grab all you can get" approach to finite mineral resources is perfectly moral and proper because, someday, those resources will be exhausted and whoever wishes to do so now has just as much right to as does anyone else. In the case of self-renewing resources, the context is different. The supply of that resource can be constant and permanent and would be unless someone depletes it beyond a certain point. Since nobody owns that resource and anybody has the exact same right as anyone else to jump in a boat and acquire that resource, I think its depletion beyond a point that it is no longer capable of being self-renewing does constitute a valid and entirely rational basis for a dispute between all of the many people who wish to exercise their right to attempt to acquire property rights in that resource. The proper resolution of that dispute has nothing to do with government "control" over fishing or "preserving nature" or "preserving the livelihood" of certain groups of fishermen. The proper role of government is to establish a legal and objective process by which any individual who chooses to exert the necessary intelligence and effort may acquire property rights in a specific self-renewing resource which exists in a finite quantity and is owned by nobody. The fact that we are dealing with international waters outside the jurisdiction of any specific government complicates the issue but does not change the essentials. In a rational world, international treaties might very well be useful in this regard. In today's world, when it comes to governments run by thugs and dictators, international treaties are frequently not worth the paper they are written on. Anyhow, sorry for the very long posting. It is just that quite a number of interesting but similar points have been raised so far in this thread which I think deserve a response with some amount of elaboration.

Nobody disputes that she killed her children. I suspect that your stumbling block here is the word "innocent." How can "innocent" ever be used in connection with such a horrible act? Keep in mind that what she was on trial for was whether she was guilty of murder - which in a court of law has a much more narrow and specific meaning that it does in daily usage. And even in daily, common usage, not all instances of killing a person constitute murder. For example, if a bear, tiger or some other wild animal, attacked and killed a child - that child would be just as dead as the Yates children are. But nobody would say that the animal "murdered" the child. Murder presupposes a rational faculty that has volitional control over itself. An animal does not have such a faculty - and for that reason animals are considered "innocent" in that they merely behave according to their nature and lack any ability to behave otherwise. Human beings do have that ability - thus making the very concepts of "guilt" and "innocence" possible . People who are truly insane have rational faculties which are impaired to such a degree that they lack awareness and/or full volitional control over their behavior and, as such, are in a similar position as a wild animal. That such impairments can and do exist is a fact of reality - and, as such, is something that courts need to take into consideration when it is, indeed, a relevant fact. Even when it comes to people who are fully sane, not all instances of killing another innocent person and other rights violations are considered murder. For example, people sometimes kill others by accident. And sometimes people destroy other's property by accident. When that happens, unless there was gross negligence which lead to the accident, no crime is considered to exist - though it is possible that one might be held responsible for civil damages. To put the issue in Objectivist terms - context is everything. It is not just enough to demonstrate that the actions of person A resulted in the death of person B. One has to take context into consideration - and since insanity is a context that sometimes does play a role in the death of one person at the hands of another, it is necessary for the legal system to take cognizance of it and act appropriately. Now, as to what exactly what should and should not constitute insanity, to what degree it should be taken into consideration and what the legal system should do in instances when it can be proven - well, I really have no specific opinion as I am neither a psychologist or a legal scholar. Nor do I have any particular opinion about the Yates case (other than I have always found the subsequent behavior of the husband/father to be very creepy) as I have simply not paid enough attention to it. My only point is that, because insanity is a fact of reality and because it is an impairment on a person's volitional, and therefore, moral, faculty, it is a context that our legal system does need to take cognizance and make provisions for. The fact that many people in today's rotten popular culture find a need to excuse and rationalize away every evil is, I admit, disgusting and obnoxious - but it has little bearing on the underlying legal issues involved.

The difficulty is that not all fish which have economic value are able to exist and be grown in captivity. The problem with the ocean is the fact that there are no property rights to speak of - and, as a result, the proper exploitation of the natural resources of the ocean is not done nearly as efficiently or up to its full potential as would be the case if capitalism were to become operative with private individuals and corporations being able to "homestead" and eventually acquire title to the fishing and mineral rights over certain geographical areas much in the same way that property rights were acquired in the unowned land in the Old West. Question: Why is the timberland in America not irresponsibly cut down and depleted in the name of making a quick buck? The answer is because much of it exists as private property and, therefore, the owners have every incentive in the world to make their decisions based on the long term benefit. Imagine, however, if there was just a huge forest with no property rights and anyone who wanted to could just come in and chop down as many trees as they could haul away. What incentive would there be for such people to selectively harvest? There would actually be a disincentive - that which you don't chop down and grab, someone else will. That is the situation which exists in the oceans - and I agree with Vladimir that the potential for things such as over fishing is a problem. But I disagree that the solution is some form of government regulation. The solution is property rights. I also think that there does exist some amount of very limited governmental role when it comes to wildlife on private property - specifically, in the area of identifying individual property rights to wildlife and to have an objective system in place to prevent disputes between individuals from arising. Property rights to a wild animal are a bit different than the property rights to domesticated animals. Basically, your chickens, goats, cats, dogs, etc are created by your effort - i.e. they are the offspring of the parents that you bought, fed and took care of. In that sense, your property rights to them are similar to your property rights to the manufactured goods that you create. The property rights you acquire to a wild animal, however, are more similar to the rights that the original homesteaders acquired to the land in open wilderness. One is not creating property but rather acquiring title to that which was previously non-property. The homesteader could not simply go out and make and arbitrarily assert that he owned all land within whatever boundaries his whims of fancy decided to lay claim to. There was an objective process involved - the government would only recognize claims of a certain size and title would be given only after a person had actually put his labor and effort into the property for a certain period of time. Such a process basically prevented whoever happened to be able to afford the strongest private army from being able to go out and arbitrarily grab whatever amount of land they had the ability to keep people off of by force. If land existed in larger quantities than there was any economic need for, then the whole issue would be moot - nobody would care how much any given person grabs. But since it does have a value, there has to be an objective process by which a large number of people can establish claim to a limited amount of land in a wilderness where property rights did not previously exist. A similar situation exists with wild animals. In the vast majority of instances, wild animals have zero economic value and nobody would have any objections, for example, to a person acquiring ownership in as many rats, cockroaches, ants and squirrels as he wishes to. But there are some wild animals that do have an economic value - not as domesticated animals but as wild animals. For example, there are many areas of the country where people rent their property out to people who hunt for such things as wild turkeys and deer - and, as such, the existence of the wild animals on the property makes it an economic asset which has a positive impact on the value of the property. Unlike domesticated animals and rights to such things as plants and minerals, deer and wild turkey are not fixed to boundaries of any given plot of land. And unlike domesticated animals, their upkeep is not something which is the result of the investment and effort of the property owner. On that basis, wild animals do not exist as property per se. Any property rights one can potentially claim to a wild animal exist only so long as the animal remains on one's property. Once the animal wanders off to someone else's property, one no longer has any potential claim to it and one has no right to demand that it be returned as one would, for example, if one's branded cattle crossed a downed fence onto a neighbor's property. The difficulty with economically valuable wildlife such as deer and wild turkeys is the fact that they are an economically valuable resource which, by its very nature, is not fixed to any given piece of private land but rather is transient and is, therefore, is an asset that is potentially shared by a great many individual property owners. Suppose I own 1/4 of the land in a 20 square mile forest populated with deer and I somehow convince McDonald's to make me a supplier of a new experimental McVenison Burger. Let's say that over the course of a six month period, all of the deer in that 20 square mile forest will eventually wonder across my property at least once. Now, suppose I were to capture and kill every deer that crossed my property line in order to fulfill my contract with McDonalds and, in doing so, I deplete all or most of the deer population in that given forest. Assuming that the other 3/4 of the landowners in the forest valued the existence of deer on their property and/or derived an economic benefit from renting out hunting rights on their property, my actions have had an adverse impact on the enjoyment and economic value of my neighbors' property. Do I have a right to hunt wild animals on my property? Sure. Do I have a right to seize the temporary, natural passage of such animals across my property as an opportunity to grab the totality of this economic resource for myself and deplete the population on surrounding property? I don't think so - especially considering that I own but a rather small minority of the range of land over which the animals naturally roam. For that reason, I do think it is valid for there to be some sort of legal process by which ownership to scarce supplies of naturally transient resources such as wild animals can be acquired in order to protect the rights of and prevent disputes arising between various property owners each of whom has a valid claim to a shared supply of that particular resource. For that reason, I don't have any particular objection to some form of bag limits and/or hunting seasons on specific economically valuable transient wildlife as a means of protecting the rights of all impacted property owners so long as they are applied for the sole purpose and only to the degree that is necessary to avoid such disputes.

I suspect your overall point has validity (I can't say that I am all that knowledgeable in this area, but what you say makes sense to me) but to point out a little "technicality" - if I am not mistaken, a "psychoanalyst" is a person who subscribes to the Freudian school of psychology - which I strongly suspect Dr. Hurd does not associate himself with. The term used in the initial posting, "psychotherapist," is probably more accurate.

Psychotrope - no, there is not an Objectivist club that is specifically for Fort Worth or Tarrant County. The percentage of Objectivists in the general population is still small enough that, in order to achieve "critical mass" membership wise it really makes sense for two nearby metropolitan areas to have a combined club. You can read more about the club in the area at: http://aynrand.meetup.com/71/ And, the good news for those of us in Fort Worth, the location where most of the meetings are held, while still a definite drive, is much easier to get to from Fort Worth than it is from Dallas in terms of traffic and, I am pretty sure. distance as well. (Unless there is some sort of race at the Texas Motor Speedway at which time anyone trying to go north from Fort Worth up I-35W is pretty much screwed) I have so far managed to make it to only one of the meetings - but I had a good time and there were several people present I would consider as being knowledgeable about Objectivism. One of the things you might consider is attending a meeting and seeing if there are any other people from Fort Worth/Tarrant County you hit it off with and see if they might be interested getting together separately between meetings.

I think you are definitely correct that the right answer is ultimately philosophy. The way I would put it is the lack of a proper moral eduction when a person is young can play a huge role in many instances. What a strong moral education can do is help counter those more "immediate causes." All of the examples given of short-term emotion based thinking have a certain appeal to people - they tempt one with a "shortcut." And the fact that attempted shortcuts will, in the long run, lead to one's own self destruction is not something which is self-evident. That is something each and every human being must either discover or learn. The problem is that such a process of discovery requires a mind that is active and reflects on the cause and consequences of its own behaviors - and since a great many people do not engage in such mental activity, an entire lifetime of evidence might pass in front of them in very painful ways and it still won't "click." Learning such things based on the experience of others through a decent moral education, however, can speed the process up. But that presupposes that such an eduction can even be had. The danger for young people who do not discover the true nature of such shortcuts is that the behavior will eventually become automatized and second nature to them. When reality does slap them in the face with evidence of the destructive nature of their ways - well, that is very uncomfortable to have to deal with and, based on their habits, they will most likely evade it. When they observe people who have become successful without taking such shortcuts - well, that, too, is something they must evade, usually in the form of hostility towards the successful person. As a result, over the long term, the person is no longer someone who is merely attempting to take a little random shortcut here and there - he becomes immoral on principle. Because we have volition, morality is ultimately a matter up to each individual. The very best moral eduction in the world is no guarantee that any given recipient will lead a moral life. And there have been plenty of individuals who have been brought up by and around the very worst sort of scumbags who have, nevertheless, become morally heroic. What a good moral eduction can do, however, is help catch and save a good many of those somewhere in the middle who, if left to their own devices, could just as easily go one way as another. Above all, a good moral education can help a young person resist peer pressure which, more often than not, is going to be in directions less than positive. In today's profoundly nihilistic post counterculture popular culture, the very worst sorts of behavior and mindsets are not just looked at with a blind eye - they are glorified. Those who advocate leading a decent and moral life are sneered at and denounced by the trendy as "uncool" "square" and "oppressive." To be "cool" in today's popular culture all too often means to be a nihilistic whim worshiper. Unless a child happens to be lucky enough to fall into a decent lot of people, that is likely the message that he will hear over and over again from his conformist, tribal peers who will withhold their approval if he fails to go along. In a better culture, it would be self-destructive behavior that would constitute grounds for alienation from his peers which would serve to reinforce his previous moral education. In a better culture, hippies, nihilists and most of today's popular musicians and movie star types would be regarded as freaks and the exact opposite of "cool" and "hip." In today's world, if a child is fortunate, he will be born into a family with loving parents who have a decent sense of life and who care about their child's future more than they care about following pop culture trends, including various child rearing fads. They will give him a "common sense" sort of moral eduction. Such an education may have its shortcomings but at least offers some sort of guidance and direction to counter the constant whim warship and nihilism the child will inevitably be confronted with. A child who is brought up to recognize that he is important and that his life is a value in the most profound and sacred sort of way will be much more likely to care about the long term and see through, resist and reject the various shortcuts and self-loathing messages that life and the popular culture will put in front of him.

I have known that this was supposed to be in the works but they now have a website up for it and a media kit which suggests that it will actually become a reality. There is going to be a new lifestyle magazine for enthusiasts of classic pre-counterculture styles, fashions and popular culture. See: http://www.classicstylemag.com/home.html It will hit newstands this December and will be carried at Barnes& Noble and Borders among other places. The projected circulation of the first issue is 20,000 copies. I will certainly subscribe. And what should be pointed out is the magazine is not some sort of "remember when" type publication. 72 percent of the publication's projected readership is under 45 years of age - all people who came of age in the post-counterculture. Things like this make me very enthusiastic about the future. I take it as just one more example of what Bob Tracinski referred to as "The Great Re-Learning" - a new generation discovering "a place we wish we had known."

And unlike other brands of boots, with Objectivist boots the measurements are omitted! (BTW - I personally think they are ghastly looking)

Here you go - For those interested, there are a whole bunch of images of old motorcycles going back as far as 1900 at: http://www.motorcycle-memories.com/imageselection.html I haven't had a chance to look at all of the images. Some of the old Christmas cards are on the site are quite charming, I think. I can see how a motorcycle would be fun - but only if there was no other traffic around.

Just a note - I did not mean to ignore your posting in my last reply. Yours was posted after I had already hit the "reply" button. Also - there seems to be a disconnect here in terminology. When I think of "biker" I don't equate it with "everyone who rides a motorcycle" - only with a certain limited subset of people who do. I have known quite a few people who rode motorcycles and were prefectly ordinary and in some cases, significantly better than ordinary, people who struck me as having very little in common with what I consider to be the "biker subculture" except for the fact that both drive motorcycles. I drive a pickup truck - but I am the very last person one would associate with certain subcultures which place a big emphasis and large degree of sympolism on pickup trucks. Here in Texas, a very high percentage of the population drives either pickup trucks or SUVs.

I know next to nothing about bikers so none of what you say comes to me as any sort of shock or surprise. What I have noticed as having a counterculture influence is their overall appearance which seems to use quite a lot of counterculture imagery. But that shouldn't be a surprise either considering that was the era in which most bikers came of age. Such is the imagery they grew up with and are familiar with. I also suspect that there is a certain romanticization of the nomadic involved - and for a very long time a major cultural stereotype of what such a lifestyle looked like was the old hippie vans and the people who occupied them. The way that people and subcultures with mixed premises survive and function is through a process of compartmentalization. I am sure we have all known people who had great senses of life and were basically rational despite being explicit advocates of some pretty horrible philosophical doctrines. Well, what is true with philosophical viewpoints is most certainly even more so when it comes to the realm of popular culture type stuff. And, in today's world, any subculture one comes across, even the best, is likely to have mixed premises. Heck - just take a look at this Forum. Even in the realm of philosophy there are quite a number of mixed premises among the membership as a whole despite the common denominator of an interest in Objectivism simply because some people are further along in their process of discovering and evaluating the philosophy than are others. As much as I advocate the aesthetic and pop cultural superiority of the 1920s and 1930s, the last thing I can do is fault a modern for not being able to understand it. How can I fault somebody for their lack of knowledge about something they have either never discovered or which has been misrepresented to them? And even for those moderns who are very familiar with the era - well, I will be the very first to admit that my admiration of it is based on a highly selective focus on that era. There were also things about that era which were NOT great - for example, the treatment accorded to black people. No matter how incredibly cool the music and entertainment that came out of the Harlem Renaissance was, it is perfectly understandable and entirely rational why a black person would NOT wish to go back and live at that time and might even have a bias towards negatively prejudging the many wonderful things from that era. Most people who lived through the 1930s did not think of it as being an especially wonderful time. They called it the "Dirty Thirties" because of the Depression and the Dust Bowl - and that is entirely understandable. What I like about the 1930s is basically the brilliant afterglow of the strong aesthetic influence of the 1920s which was still going strong early in the decade but which began to lose steam as the decade progressed. My appreciation for the early 1900s decades is seen through the lens of a person who grew up in the midst of the horrors of the early post-counterculture. I will be the first to admit that my admiration for that era is highly romanticized - though that doesn't mean it isn't firmly rooted in the actual facts of the era either. When I program the music on Radio Dismuke, I only focus on a very specific spectrum of the sort of music which was available at the time. And, within that spectrum, there are a great many recordings in my collection which simply do not make the cut for inclusion. If I wanted to, I could very easily put together a station of nothing but recordings from that era which would be pretty dull and dreadful to listen to. Instead, I focus on what I consider to be the best and most essential aspects of that era. A person who approaches the early 1900s decades with an entirely different focus might be turned off by what he sees - and depending on the specific nature of that focus, he might be entirely justified in feeling that way. The same is true with today's subcultures which have a strong counterculture influence - there are a great many decent people who approach them with a highly selective focus on the best of the "mixed" aspects while downplaying or ignoring the countercultural aspects. There is nothing wrong with that - indeed, it is often the only means that people who are trapped in a rotten culture have open to them of pursuing values and preserving their spiritual sanity.

Well, just because I have rejected them as a fashion statement does not imply that I have ever suggested that anyone else in the world ought to do so. And even my own rejection of them is contextual. If were a young college student with only $50 to my name to spend on a wardrobe, I would go to Wal-mart or Target and buy myself some blue jeans. I would do so because, within the limitations of my budget, the very best I could hope to achieve wardrobe wise is to try and avoid standing out looking worse than everybody else. Blending in with the mob would be a much better alternative - and blue jeans are certainly good for that. Well, perhaps you overlooked the posting in which I basically admitted as much when I said that I had overlooked the fact that blue jeans are also a very important part of Western wear. I don't personally relate to a Western, cowboy image - but I certainly do not regard it as nihilistic or as having anything to do with the counterculture. A point that I think is very important for me to make in order to head off potential misunderstandings is this: Unlike the 1960s hippies, I am NOT a nihilist. If something gives decent and rational people joy and enjoyment - well, I think it is wonderful that they have found something which can give it to them. And just because something has its roots in 1960s counterculture, it does NOT necessarily follow that a decent and rational person cannot ever enjoy it. A good example that comes to mind is Dr. Peikoff who once mentioned that he enjoyed horror movies when he was young. While the genre of horror movies is most certainly based on a malevolent universe premise, it doesn't necessarily follow that Dr. Peikoff shared that premise. It all depends on the reasons he liked such movies. In his instance, what he enjoyed about horror movies, if I recall correctly, was that the monsters and such were NOT ordinary "folks next door" type characters. If you enjoy the biker subculture - which I strongly suspect does have more than its fair share of counterculture influence - well, the question is why do you like it? What values does it offer you? If your answers to those questions involve nihilism - well, there is a problem. But if it does not - so long as it is not self-destructive in some way or a jeopardy to your other long term values, go for it and enjoy it to the fullest. In this case, who cares what I happen to think? I am just some nobody from Fort Worth who only has but one name. What matters here is what you think. If that subculture has "mixed" premises - well, try to enjoy the good aspects and just keep a sharp eye out for any bad ones which might exist. There is absolutely nothing wrong with maintaining a selective focus in such instances so long as it does not involve evading relevant and important facts. In the past year or so, I have developed a very odd appreciation for certain types of Soviet propaganda posters and images. That doesn't make me a Marxist or a Stalinist or an apologist for the USSR or imply that I sanction such things in any way whatsoever. The Soviets were evil tyrants who murdered tens of millions of people. But some of the propaganda drawings had kind of an interesting style - and I don't see anything wrong with my holding a selective focus to enjoy those particular aspects of the artwork so long as I do not drop or evade the wider context of what those works actually mean. The same principle holds true for people who value certain things which happen to have a countercultural link. If somebody close to me was murdered by the Soviets, I would have a much more difficult time seeing past the pain and appreciating the things I do about its propaganda art. The counterculture attacked a great many of the values that I think made the world it destroyed very wonderful and special. Those values mean a great deal to me - so as a result, it is very difficult for me to stomach much of anything with a strong counterculture link to it.

"Working class" should never be equated with "low class." There are classy working class people and there are the other kind. Working class people can rarely afford, and those who can are usually not interested in wearing high fashion or formal clothes. But so what? Most working class people used to have their "Sunday best" - and, in doing so, entered into the realm of formal clothes. If one does not go to church or does not dress for it, they may not even have a need for such clothes. They can still dress with style and flair in the sort of clothes they do wear. Context is everything. The secret may not be in the jeans - but if he were to wear $2,000 tailored suits when he met with his clients, do you really think that their reaction would be particularly positive? Again, context is everything. In such a business, formal clothes would be a dis value I suspect that there has been a great deal of counterculture influence on "biker culture." It is not something that I can relate to in any way personally. Nor would I even want to ride a bike - with the idiots on the road it is already scary enough riding in a more substantial vehicle. But I can grasp in an abstract sense why people enjoy riding motorcycles. As to the subcultural aspects of it - well, just because someone has been influenced by the counterculture does not mean that they endorse it or even see the connection to it. Everyone alive today in Western culture has been influenced by it in some way or another, I suspect. A great deal of what one feels comfortable with culturally is based on what one has been exposed to. It is entirely to be expected that a great many people today - including perfectly moral and rational people - feel comfortable with aspects of the counterculture. That is the context into which they were born and raised. Other people - such as myself when I was a kid - rebel against the "conventional wisdom" of the day. I discovered and became comfortable with at an early age an era that was very much different than the counterculture. I would be lying if I didn't say that I consider that era to be vastly superior in many important respects. I do look down on a great many of the so-called "values" of the post counterculture world. But I don't look down on someone merely because he has been influenced by them. I have had people in the past who worked for me who lived very odd lifestyles and wore very wierd items of clothing - nose rings, you name it. They were very productive people and I had great rapport with them. People are individuals and must be judged accordingly. My big point is that a world which was vastly different from the post counterculture world that most people today take for granted and as the given did once exist not so long ago - a world that the popular culture and the media has often distorted and ignored. Many people alive today have very little idea what it was all about. I do know what it was about. And my discovery of it as a child made me feel like I had discovered some wonderful, lost civilization, which, in a sense, I had. And, in my eagerness and excitement to share my discovery with others - well, I was utterly baffled by the indifference and, in some cases, ridicule and hostility I was met with. I have never lost that need and desire to let other people know about that discovery. Thankfully, the culture has improved since then and the reaction I receive is frequently positive. I will, of course, never actually live in that world. But I always like what Ayn Rand said about fighting for the future: those who fight for it live in it today. And so is the case in my mini-crusade to bring the world of the early 1900s to the attention of deserving moderns: by fighting to keep the memory and the forgotten spirit of that world alive, in a way, I am living in it today. And, because nihilism, and therefore the counterculture and its aftermath, is nothing but a dead end into nothingness, I suspect that by fighting for the values of the past, I am, in a way, fighting for the values which will eventually lead us to a better future. I sure hope so. If I took it personally every time somebody trashed some aspect of the pre-counterculture world that I value so much - well, I would be spending my entire life feeling insulted.

That is actually a good point. In the part of country I am from, hippies are NOT held in good regard by most people (unless you happen to be in Austin!) and never were (one of the things that I really like about Texas!). Here, a great many people wear blue jeans with boots, cowboy hats and western shirts. While such dress evokes images of a subculture that I do not particularly relate to on a personal level, it is certainly not a subculture for which I have contempt and it is a subculture which is vastly more noble and rational than the hippies and their heirs who are neither noble or rational in any respect. And, hippies, of course, despise such people. It is kind of odd that I did not think of western wear when the subject of denim came up. I guess it is because the two groups wear the denim in very different ways and, somehow, the denim looks different too. Unfortunately, I have a hard time describing that difference - but there is a difference.

You are reading into my postings stuff that simply isn't there. I have not particularly immersed myself into the history of fashion. I have, however, read and occasionally refer to books - all of them relatively modern books, by the way - on the subject of how to dress well and project a certain type of image that I have from time to time considered in my personal self interest to do. There have been occasions in business where it was necessary for me to project a professional image. Since there are very specific ways of doing so, if I wish to project such an image, it is my responsibility to learn the what those ways are. I also have a personal interest in the early 1900s decades and I do enjoy the clothes of the period - but if I ever decided to buy some, I would end up having to ask someone such as Vladimir or some of the people on The Fedora Lounge for a great deal of advice. Furthermore, since we are in a discussion about fashion, I don't think it is at all unreasonable to expect the participants in such a discussion to know what they are talking about and to point it out when another participant does not - which is all I have done in your instance with regard to the proper usage and meaning of ties. Not knowing much about fashion is not a moral issue, But if you are going to venture opinions on something that you don't understand or don't understand as well as you thought you did - well, that is a risk that every one of us takes anytime we venture an opinion, isn't it? Who cares about what other people think? Well, you should if you hope to engage in value for value trade with them. You should care that what people think of you is based on an accurate reflection of yourself, your intentions and your character. You should very much care if the perception that you are projecting to other people is contrary to the positive values that you have to offer. If you are in a line of work - let's say you are financial planner - where you are going to be asking people to trust their life savings to you, it is in your self-interest to be able to project an image of success and professionalism. Lets say that you are a VERY good financial planner. The fact that you show up for a meeting with a potential client driving a hail damaged 10 year old low-end car wearing cut-off shorts, a tie-dyed tee shirt and a gimme cap and sneakers that have been repaired with duct tape - well, the reality of the situation might be that you an outstanding financial planner who simply enjoys being comfortable and has a sense of frugality that makes you reluctant to give up a car that still successfully gets you from point A to point B. But the very understandable perception - a perception that you, by virtue of your choices and actions have helped create - is going to be the exact opposite of someone who is a successful, serious professional. Maybe it is unfair that prospective clients will prejudge you based on your appearance. Maybe it is unfair that they dismiss you out of hand before you have a chance to show them your proven track record. But the reality is that people DO form evaluations of you based on first impressions - just as I am sure you form certain negative first impressions about certain people who dress in certain ways. There are ways, however, of communicating and projecting values such as professionalism, success, wealth, power, seriousness - through the clothes you wear, the car you drive etc. If so, isn't it in your self-interest to know what they are and how to use them to your advantage as you go about the task of marketing your services to a wider base of customers? If I wished to be a very successful country music singer - how successful do you think I would be if I refused to wear anything but top hat and tails while I performed and appeared in public? Is it fair that country music fans have certain images that they expect their performers to project? Maybe? But since those expectations are a fact of reality, they are something that one needs to take cognizance of. Corporations spend millions of dollars a year on advertising to create a certain "image" for their brand so that they can improve their market share. Why on earth would you not want to learn how to create the specific "image" that will enable you to better communicate to others why they should do the things you want them to do - whether it be to give you a job, to agree to go on a date with you, or to buy your product?

You are essentially making the same argument with regard to messages we communicate to others through our clothing that the advocates of Ebonics make with regard to language. And the results of both, if carried to their logical conclusion, would be the same: nobody would have any idea exactly what another person is trying to say. The cultural associations of what certain types of clothing stands for cannot be singlehandedly changed by me or you or any one person specifically. Such things can and do and should change as they have changed down through the centuries. But, like language, it is necessary for such things to evolve rather than changing in fundamental ways overnight. If you wish to get a job and be successful in a great many industries, it is necessary to project a certain type of image. The only time I have ever worn a suit to my present job was on a day when I had to testify as a witness in court before I came in. Nobody wears a suit to work at the company I work for unless they have a similar sort of reason. But I guarantee you that I wore a suit during my job interviews. My not wearing a suit for interview for a management position - well, that would not have communicated the right sort of message even though the person who was interviewing me was dressed casually. My suit did not win me my job - but it certainly enabled me to project during the interview that I was a serious and professional candidate who does have enough familiarity with the business world to know what the appropriate customs of dress are, even if they are not practiced at this specific company. My wearing a suit indicated that I had respect for the interview process and my potential employer, that I took it seriously and that I wanted to be taken seriously as a candidate. If I wore a tee shirt and jeans to work tomorrow, nobody would say a word other than perhaps make the observation that I was dressed different than normal. But what if I wore a tee shirt and blue jeans to my job interview? Regardless of the information that is on my resume, what sort of image would I have projected both about myself, my level of respect towards the company and my level of interest in actually getting the job? If you wish to ignore or disregard certain conventions in your dress - well, in a free country you are entitled to do so. But you also must face the consequences - which in many professions, may mean reduced or extremely limited employment opportunities. If you like to wear lots of nose rings and such - well, you might have to choose between your style of dress and being a banker. Personally, I reject the convention of blue jeans as a fashion statement. For years, I refused to wear them at all on principle. I know that blue jeans in their modern usage have evolved beyond their original counterculture context. But the fact is that the modern roots of denim are in the counterculture - and I despise the counterculture, I view it as evil and an assault on everything which I hold dear and sacred and I want NOTHING to do with it, no matter how derivative and watered down it might have since become. Whenever I do discover that I have, in some way or another, been infected by counterculture based premises that I picked up by virtue of growing up in a post counterculture world (the biggest example has been in the realm of my manners - but there have been other areas as well) I make it a big priority to root it out of my life as quickly as possible. I ended up buying some blue jeans a few years ago because we were redecorating at the office and I was needing to do some crawling around and helping move stuff out of the way - and the jeans I do own are the cheapo kind that I got from Wal-mart because that is something I refuse to spend very much of my hard earned money on. For me, I use jeans only for their original function: work clothes. In rejecting today's post counterculture convention of wearing blue jeans, I am fully aware that I risk certain consequences - certain types of people are likely to consider me to be "uncool." Since such people would consider me to be "uncool" no matter how I dress, I am fully prepared to face those consequences. The price I pay for that is minimal. If you wish to reject the conventions of formality which have managed to survive despite the counterculture - you may do so, but there will most likely be certain consequences. If you are not prepared to face those consequences - well, the good news is that there are plenty of ways to express one's individuality within the context of most forms of conventional clothing whether it be blue jeans or a business suit.

Gee - JASKN, you are the last person in this thread I figured I would have to invoke the "form follows function" principle with. But in this case, I do. There is a reason why a tie is not appropriate with jeans - and the right colors and textures are irrelevant because it has nothing to do with "looks." A tie is NOT just some arbitrary "decoration." It exists for a very specific purpose. People properly wear ties in certain delimited contexts for very specific reasons in order to communicate and project a very specific messages. Outside of that context, a tie is useless - in fact, it is worse than useless. To give a different example, wearing a pocket square can add a dash of flair and elegance to an otherwise ordinary suit. However, if you were wearing a tee shirt with a pocket or a polo shirt with a pocket and you decided to use it to sport a pocket square - well, I don't care how well the colors and textures coordinate, people would justifiably look at you as if you were Rufus Goofus. At a bare minimum, a tie says "I am dressed up." Wearing jeans - even expensive "designer" jeans states the exact opposite. Jeans are, as a matter of principle, an exclusively casual form of clothing. There is a place for ties in casual clothing. One sometimes sees "creative" and "artsy" types who wear suits, dress shirts and ties which would be considered way too flamboyant to be appropriate as business attire in all but a few of the more "artsy" professions. But even in these situations a tie is a way of "dressing up" albeit in a purely casual context. Such clothes are a way of coming across as less formal but within the context of a specific tradition of dress. Blue jeans in their modern context are NOT part of that same tradition. As a fashion statement, their contemporary usage, in fact, evolved from a tradition that had nothing but contempt for suits and ties and the implicit messages that such clothes communicated. Blue jeans are not merely casual - they are specifically and, as a matter of principle, non-formal. In their historical context, blue jeans were work clothes for people who performed manual labor - and, as such, there was NOTHING formal or "dressy" about them. The 1960s hippies adopted blue jeans because they had previously been viewed as working class type clothes which they then elevated into fashion statement in the name of egalitarianism. That the hippies adopted denim for this purpose was not a tribute to the hard working farmers, ranchers and factory workers who previously wore it but rather an insult, albeit in a rather backhanded form. It is true that, as a result of their popularization during the counterculture, blue jeans have, as a form of clothing, evolved beyond their original hippie/countercultural connotations. Most people today who wear blue jeans are not hippies and would be disgusted at the sight of one. What remains intact, however, is the implicit egalitarianism that blue jeans have come to symbolize as a fashion statement. You mention that there are very expensive and "exclusive" brands of blue jeans. Like, Vladimir I find that to be very amusing. But I also find it to be a sign of something good. It just goes to show that, even after the counterculture, people do continue to seek out something more than just the lowest common egalitarian denominator. They do wish to have clothes which are a "cut above" and which are special. In other words, such people do wish to "look their best" - they just wish to do so without breaking out of the egalitarian mold of "fitting in with everyone else" that is now firmly entrenched in our popular culture and which the convention of wearing of blue jeans as a fashion statement has come to represent. I am afraid that this is incorrect. The fact that a tie symbolizes and communicates something very specific is NOT arbitrary. It is a firmly established convention and tradition. Now, one can argue that this particular convention is nothing more than a historical accident and that things could have evolved in such a way that something different than the ties we know today might have come to symbolize the same exact thing. And that is certainly correct.- but that is not what happened. The conventions of formality in clothing evolved the way that they did evolve - and, as a result, a tie does convey a certain message that virtually everyone in the culture, whether they love ties or hate them, grasps on some implicit level. The exact same things that a hippie despises about suits and ties are the exact same things I like about them - which is a pretty good sign that the message that they communicate is objective and well understood by both parties. Because we do project implicit messages to others by virtue of the clothes we choose to wear, fashion is one area in a rational culture where tradition and convention does have a proper role to play. Another area where tradition and convention have a proper role to play is in the use of language. And there is a reason why this is the case in both instances: both the specific words we use and how we use them and the specific clothes we wear and how we wear them constitute forms of communication. And in order for such communication between people to be objective, there must be certain commonly understood conventions of what means what. If you think about it, such conventions are firmly established in all parts of our culture and any other culture - even with regard to the contemporary usage of blue jeans. For example, why are blue jeans blue? Isn't that just a matter of historical accident - perhaps blue dye was cheaper way back when? Blue is a nice color - but isn't red also nice and what about green? Isn't it kind of arbitrary that the most widely accepted form of color for denim happens to be blue? What would happen if you went to school wearing the exact same jeans that you do today - except for the fact that they were, instead, a similar shade of red? Or how about yellow jeans? Or what if you wore pink jeans? What sort of message would that send to your classmates and what would they likely say behind your back? Isn't it a mere arbitrary convention that, in order to make communicate a certain fashion statement of "fitting in" it is necessary to were jeans which are blue? Well, it is a convention - but it isn't arbitrary. It isn't arbitrary because that is the way things have evolved - and, therefore, it is something you take cognizance of when you go clothes shopping. To use a different example, it is a matter of historical accident that the US military salute is what it is and did not develop into the Nazi salute. And there is nothing intrinsically horrible about the Nazi salute other than the fact that it has come to be associated with the Nazis. Had the USA come up with it in the early 1800s, we might, in fact, consider it to be downright patriotic. One might even be able to perhaps make an aesthetic case that the Nazi salute is more graceful, elegant and expressive. But nobody would make that case because the convention of what a specific military salute communicates is not arbitrary - and if you see a person doing the Seig Heil salute, you are likely to pass certain judgments on him. Now, it is indeed true that there are people out there who, thanks to the egalitarian "anything goes" mindset of the counterculture, have never been taught the specific images and messages that certain items of non- "counterculture approved" clothing do project and convey. The fact that some people are ignorant of the specific message that a tie communicates does not change the fact that it does communicate something specific and that this fact is not something that is arbitrary on grounds that Dismuke and Vladimir and a bunch of other fuddie duddies happen to say so. Have you ever known a very pretentious person - perhaps a child - who has been around older or more educated people with better vocabulary and then went around and started throwing big words around in conversation without actually understanding the full meaning or proper usage of such words? When you encounter such people, what do you think of them? If they are very young, you might find it amusing in a charming sort of way. If the person is an adult, you probably feel a sense of pity at their lack of a good education. When a person starts to use articles of clothing without regard for the messages that they exist to communicate - well, when they encounter people who do understand, they essentially place themselves in the exact same position as a person who uses big words that he doesn't understand. He will be viewed as either pretentious or pathetically ignorant. And that is exactly what I think whenever I see someone wearing blue jeans with a tie. Either the person is trying to look dressed up in a very sad sort of way beyond his financial means or else he is utterly ignorant in the proper usage of clothes.

I have some comments on various things including Inspector's posting that will have to wait until I have more time. However, I do want to put up a few words about the Michael J. Fox picture. I don't think Fox's clothing is nihilistic. In fact, his motives are probably the opposite: I think he is attempting to add a touch of style and class to a casual outfit. Unfortunately, I don't think it works very well. The first thing he needs to do is either ditch the tie or put on different pants. Never wear a tie with blue jeans. It looks dorky. Blue jeans are traditionally work clothes - clothes that are very likely to get grubby and dirty while working on the farm and are durable enough to withstand it and wash clean. True, blue jeans have taken on a different meaning in recent decade and most people wouldn't dare wear the jeans they slapped down ridiculous amounts of money for while doing gardening. Nevertheless, blue jeans remain as examples of very casual clothing. Wearing a tie with blue jeans looks about as absurd as a farmer wearing a top hat with his bib overalls while riding up and down his fields in a tractor. Now, I have seen people wearing sports coats with blue jeans and I think it looked ok. But that's because a sports coat is also an example of casual clothing - though not as casual, of course, as blue jeans. I don't have a problem with people wearing a sports coat to dress up their blue jeans (though I am not a big fan of it). It is just that it does not look absurd. Wearing a tie with blue jeans does. Personally, I don't understand the modern obsession with blue jeans. As has been pointed out, they are not especially comfortable items of clothing - especially in the summer months. The only time I wear them is when I am doing grubby work or during the cooler months of the year in very casual situations such as hanging around the house or running errands or maybe attending a very casual social gathering of some sort. I certainly don't wear blue jeans as any sort of fashion statement - indeed, they are the ultimate example of an anti-fashion statement. They are the clothes one wears if one wishes to blend in with the masses and look like everybody else. There are occasions when a person might want to do this - and for that they are valid. They are certainly a godsend for anybody who is on an extremely limited clothing budget. When one does not have much money for clothes - well, unless one is lucky enough to hit a bonanza in one's size at a thrift store, it is probably going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to be dressed better than average. One's objective then, should be to try and put a wardrobe together where one does not look worse than average - and since blue jeans in today's world are the "uniform of the masses" and one can buy store brands for not a lot of money, one need not go around looking like a dork. Khakis are a huge step up from blue jeans and don't cost very much more money. But if one is a starving college student and can only afford to own two or three pairs of pants, one can get away with it much easier with blue jeans and can wear them much longer after they begin to age and wear than one can with khakis. Being the default "uniform of the masses" makes them more versatile. This gives me an opportunity to bring up a point that I do think needs to be included at least somewhere in this thread: When evaluating whether or not a person you know is well dressed, it is necessary to take their financial circumstances into consideration. The question to ask is "what clothing choices do they make within the context of that which they can afford." One of the things that is nice about today is the fact that, due to the widespread "lowest common denominator" mentality, it is possible for someone with little money to not have to stand out because of it. And for those who do have excellent taste in clothing but do not have much money - well, that can be a very frustrating experience. One can think: "gee, folks back in the 1930s looked really cool - that is a much more accurate reflection of my values than looking like a run of the mill prole." And then one remembers that it won't be until next week that one will have the extra cash needed to go to Wal-mart and purchase the much needed replacement for the pair of blue jeans that have worn out beyond repair. In that situation, all one can do is look as nice as one can within the limits of what he can afford - and don't try to dress beyond what you can afford as that will look even worse. Someday you will be able to dress nicer - and when that time comes, you may or may not decide to spend the money to do so. Clothing is nothing more than packaging. I have been arguing in this thread that such packaging is very important - but that doesn't change the fact that packaging is all it is. I have a friend who I have every reason to believe thinks that Vladimir and I and the people over at The Fedora Lounge are border line loony when it comes to the issue of fashion and clothes (he is just too polite to say so). He dresses like a typical college kid - and I don't think one bit less of him as a result. That is merely one value we do not share in common - just as I have Objectivist friends who do not share my taste in music and vintage music friends who subscribe to philosophical world views that I profoundly disagree with. I have almost as much contempt for snobs as I do egalitarians - so my postings in this thread should not be interpreted as being snobbish. That having been said, however, it should be pointed out that having high standards does not make one a snob

Actually, the very worst ice storm I have ever personally seen was when I was in Houston in January 1997. It was so bad that they had to close downtown and the Galleria area off because huge and extremely dangerous multi-story icicles kept crashing down from the tops of tall buildings. Here is a description of the storm that I googled up. I am just glad we don't have to deal with earthquakes in these parts. At least with hurricanes and to a significantly lesser degree with tornados, one has at least some sort of warning. Still, it was VERY scary a couple of years ago when I had to exit the highway in a thunderstorm because it was raining too hard to drive and then heard the tornado sirens go off. I took refuge in a Wal-mart just as they were evacuating everyone in the store into the back room where I remained for well over an hour in a store without electricty (thus no air conditioning) with a couple of hundred people, many of them screaming kids, as one potentially tornadic cell after another moved over that particular part of town.

Except you guys have all the good Indian food joints and the huge Fiesta Marts. Those two restaurant recommendations of yours I tried out last time I was down there were wonderful - and the Fiesta Marts here range from ok, scaled down versions to downright iky. One of the things I love about Houston is that its ethnic diversity makes it feel so very cosmopolitan. D/FW as a whole is much more...I guess "mainstream" is a better way to describe it. At least we don't have the humidity to such a degree - and no hurricanes either.

I think a better way of putting it would be that the rule makes a good point only if it is applied contextually. It certainly is not inherently contextual because it is put forth as an article of dogma. The problem with religious based moral teachings is not that they don't sometimes make valid points. There are, for example, perfectly valid points in the Ten Commandments. The problem with those points, however, is that they are commandments put forth as dogma because an authority says so. Contextual absolutism and dogma are diametric opposites. In today's culture, religion is pretty much the only place most people can turn to for moral principles and moral guidance. I've known quite a number of parents who were not particularly religious who, nevertheless, sent their kids to church or church schools because they felt that they might offer them benefit in the way of moral instruction. As a result, there are a great many people out there who are fundamentally rational and have great senses of life who consider themselves to be religious. Most of them temper religion with "common sense" and, in doing so, often imply a de-facto sort of contextualism in their day-to-day application of it. My own experience is I have seen a lot of people who were once complete whim worshipping subjectivist hippie types who turned their lives around after becoming religious. They, of course, credit their subsequent success and happiness to religion. My take on it is it is because they, for the first time in their lives, took moral issues seriously - and, as a result, they took how they conducted their day-to-day lives seriously for the first time in their lives.

Vladimir would actually be a better person to direct the question to as that is a subject he is very knowledgeable about. Perhaps when he has a chance, he will post his comments. As for me - while I very much have a strong appreciation for nice clothes, my own wardrobe is not especially special. I own a nice suit, two sports coats, a good number of ties from back when I had to wear one to work everyday, dress shirts, dress pants and things such as cuff links, suspenders, collar pins etc. But, since we have a very casual dress code at work (which, in some respects I do enjoy), I rarely get an opportunity to wear them these days. I occasionally go to the ballet or opera and that is always a chance to dress nice. But I don't own any formal wear and would really have to go out of my way to actually find an opportunity to wear it. I would enjoy getting a few items of 1920s/1930s vintage clothing that I could wear for certain special occasions such as Radio Dismuke social events which I have hosted in the past and plan on doing again and some of the other social functions where "Dismuke" shows up. The problem for me is simply the fact that, at 6'2", I am quite a bit taller than most people were back during the "Golden Era" and, as a result, vintage clothes are kind of hard to come by in my size. Plus, of course, one is also dealing with used clothing - so condition is also a factor. In a way, I kind of think it is a shame to actually wear vintage clothing and subject it to wear and possible damage. If I ever get any, I would only wear it on very special occasions. As of now, the only vintage wear I own is a 1920s era smoking jacket, a 1920s or 1930s wrist watch I picked up on ebay and a very nice vintage Homburg hat that Vladimir found on ebay and let me have when he discovered it did not fit him. Still, I could incorporate the hat and the watch and any other items that I might stumble across with traditionally styled modern clothes and probably put forth a pretty dashing image. Kind of a sad commentary on the modern world, however, that if I felt like dressing up, I would have to go out of my way to find to find a setting where I would not stand out like a sore thumb. As for the decline in standards of formal wear - I suspect it is, in large part, due to the fact that most of the people who wear it these days do so only because they feel they have to. It is something that they never learned to appreciate and, therefore, something they are mostly ignorant of in terms of the finer points and details. I must confess that I, too, am largely ignorant of those finer points - though not as a result of a lack of appreciation but rather a lack of any practical need to have ever learned. Almost all I know about formal wear is stuff I have picked up in conversations with Vladimir. What drives me crazy is the sight of so-called "creative" and "artistic" types who will commit acts such as wearing a nice suit with tennis shoes as some sort of fashion statement - something I consider to be very nihilistic. (Last time I was in New York, I saw people in business suits who put on sneakers for their walk home, presumably for comfort. While ridiculous looking, I wouldn't necessarily consider those individuals to be nihilists).

You are absolutely correct. But the people I feel sorry for is not the nihilists. They have miserable lives from the get go as a congenital condition. The people I have always felt sorry for is everyone else who came of age during and in the aftermath of the counterculture and never got to enjoy or discover the emotional richness and texture that the popular culture in decades past was once able to offer. Last August 4, Bob Tracinski in his TIA Daily linked to and quoted from a Los Angeles Times article which, unfortunately, is no longer posted on the web. The article was about how there has been a recent boom in the number of people signing up for ballroom dancing instruction. One of the people mentioned in the article was quoted as saying: "Somehow, ballroom dancing offers a place of civility and comfort.' People feel a nostalgia for something lost... Things now are so fast-moving, so unsure, I think that it brings us, in a wistful way, to a place we wish we had known. I know it sounds old-fashioned, but somehow it's resonating." Here is Tracinski's commentary based on that article. The title he gave for his posting was "The Great Re-Learning: 'A Place We Wish We Had Known'" The past century was an era of cultural destruction, in which cultural institutions, values, and knowledge developed over a period of centuries was smashed to pieces by the nihilistic subjectivism of the leftist "counterculture." Now some people have begun a slow process of cultural re-building as they grasp--without being able to say exactly why--the need to reclaim elements of the culture that have been lost. When I read that posting and the title he gave it - well a chill went down my spine and I felt a very strange emotion. Tracinski had summed in a very short paragraph a very central aspect of my life since childhood. When I was a kid, I thought of it in terms of "I must have been born in the wrong era." Later on, I came across Ayn Rand's term "cultural value deprivation" which very aptly described my feelings about my relationship to the popular culture in which I grew up. But "a place we wish we had known" - well, ever since I made the childhood discover that there actually once was such a place, a very important and profoundly personal part of my life has been the indescribably exciting and adventurous, though sometimes poignant and terribly lonely, process of discovering that place through its surviving artifacts and ruins and the precious elements which have somehow managed to survive and, in some cases be revived, in today's world. That process of discovery continues. And after all these years, there are still occasions when some subtle nuance of what life back then had to offer but no longer does will occur to me - and the best way I can describe the feeling is of having been "cheated." There are things that I LOVE about the today's world. The widespread availability of air conditioning here in Texas is wonderful. Thanks to mp3 technology, whenever I go out of town on a lengthy trip, I can bring with me hundreds of hours of music in a very small amount of space. I used to have to lug with me boxes and boxes of CDs. Before I owned a CD player, one of the things I dreaded about long trips is that I would be completely deprived from my much needed spiritual "fix" of listening to "my kind of music" which I had less than a snowball's chance of hell of being able to find on AM/FM radio. It is kind of hard to drag very many 78 rpm records, which weighed a half pound each, along on a trip. The advent of the Internet has been indescribably wonderful for me and has ended great deal of the isolation I once felt. Today, I barely have time to keep up with all of the postings to the Message Board on my own website, let alone the many, many others that are devoted to some aspect or another of the early 1900s decades. There are countless websites out there that have enabled me to speed up my process of discovery in a very significant and rewarding way. Thanks to the Internet, new generations of young people are embarking on that same discovery. I hear on a regular basis from teenagers who stumbled across and have become big fans of Radio Dismuke. Thanks to the Internet, now more than ever, it is possible for me to selectively ignore the aspects of the modern life that I dislike and immerse myself in the aspects of the past that I admire and interact with a small but growing like-minded subculture. For those who have no idea what I am talking about when I refer to "1970s ugliness" you can find some excellent examples at: http://www.lileks.com/institute/interiors/index.html Click on "next" to see the various examples - and be sure to read the commentary in the captions as it is hilarious. Thankfully, much of that extreme degree of visual ugliness was in full retreat and had largely disappeared by the time I was a teenager - though it continued to linger on for a number of years afterwards in places such as the dining room where I went to college which would have fit in perfectly with the rooms on that website I linked to. I basically came of age in a culture which was in the beginning stages of a popular backlash against the counterculture which continues to this day - though with the nihilists still in full charge of those aspects of the popular culture which are considered "trendy" and "hip." While the ugliness and much the active destruction had receded in many areas, the best description I have for the world that was left is "sterile and emotionally sanitized." A few years back, a fellow at work confided to me that he had once been on medication for anxiety attacks. The doctor never was able to adequately adjust the medication and, against doctors orders, he quit using it because, while it did stop the anxiety attacks, he considered the side effects of the medication to be worse than the attacks. His description of the effects was that it basically cut off both ends of his emotional spectrum. He remained fully in control of his mental processes but experienced a constant a feeling of indifference towards anything, good or bad. If one of his kids misbehaved badly, his only reaction was: "well, I guess I am supposed to do something about it." If his wife came in with especially good news about something, his reaction was merely to take cognizance of the specific facts and say "ok, that's fine." His description of the effects of that medication have remained with me because it occurred to me that it was also the best description I have yet to find of a great many aspects of the post-counterculture world into which I came of age. While no longer no longer explicitly nihilistic, those aspects of the culture, nevertheless had been stripped of their ability to evoke the range of emotional reactions which had once made them special. Given the nature of nihilism and the nature of emotions, I think this makes perfect sense. As mentioned in a previous posting, the nihilists' revolt against reality in the realm of other people and human achievement takes the form of an assault on and a hostility towards values - not just particular values they do not share but values as such. And exactly what is an emotion? It is essentially an automated, subconscious value judgment. And while emotionalism - i.e. being guided by one's emotions instead of one's conscious, rational judgment - is a bad thing, emotions are a profoundly important part of a successful and happy life as they are the means by which we experience our values. Of what importance is a great work of art, a novel, one's romantic partner, of success in one's career, of earning any money beyond that which is necessary to one alive except for the emotional satisfaction one will achieve as a result? It is not that nihilists are anti-emotion - they are the very worst and most out of control emotionalists one will ever encounter. But by their constant assaults (usually through sneers and ridicule) on our very capacity to value and, through their stranglehold on the popular culture, by making a great many values all but invisible to young people raised with mainstream upbringings, the result has been an entire generation or two of people with stunted emotional lives and an inability to experience and/or feel comfortable expressing in any intense sort of way a great many wonderful and positive emotions. (Negative emotions are a different story - people today are very capable of expressing those. Just look at any member of the Angry Left) This, in turn, impacts the sort of art and other aesthetic endeavors that people today respond to or create. When they do encounter art and other aesthetic works that do project those positive emotions which were most brutally assailed by the counterculture, a great many moderns find it to be very strange and foreign. They are unable to relate because they have never learned and are unable to understand the emotional "language" that the creater of the work took for granted and which is essential in order to properly appreciate it. Strong displays of negative emotion are accepted as a given in today's popular culture. Equally strong displays of positive emotion, however, tend to be regarded with suspicion and sometimes even derision. I will try to give a couple of examples of what I mean by "emotionally sanitized" in areas which are of personal importance to me: music and architecture. While my favorite music is pre-1940 pop and jazz, I am able to appreciate and, to one degree or another, enjoy musical styles up through pre-Beatles rock and roll. I actually really enjoy some of the doo-wop music of the late '50s and early '60s. After the mid 1960s, there is very little that I can stomach. I have made attempts to explore and find some way of developing at least an appreciation for the musical genres of today that I at least don't consider explicitly nihilistic - such as soft rock, smooth so-called "jazz", country and western and the non rap, non heavy metal pop recordings. I am simply unable to do so. I can find isolated aspects and elements that I can say positive things about - but my reaction to the experience as a whole is slightly less than indifferent. I say "less than" because, after a while, it becomes very boring and monotonous. Melody is one of the primary means by which music communicates emotion and that is what is most strikingly absent from today's music. To the degree that melody does exist, it is watered down, smuggled in and apologized for and exists only in a very minimalistic sort of way. Occasionally, something will resonate a bit with me - but without exception it is because they have revived and smuggled in references to music from the pre-counterculture, such as early rock and rol or traditional music from the Caribbean or Latin America. It is very difficult for me to become too excited about such revivals because I can very easily access and listen to the original, non-bastardized versions. Listening to modern music - well, it is like I am listening to only a very tiny sanitized sliver of the emotional spectrum. In architecture, the art deco movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which lingered on in increasingly watered down form through the 1950s, demonstrated that "form follows function" does NOT have to be sterile, minimalistic, bland and utterly lacking in ornamentation. Just look at the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in New York City. Counterculture nihilism in architecture is best expressed by the school known as "Brutalism" which polluted the landscape with buildings that were harsh, cold, ugly and utterly devoid of any charm or ornamentation. Yes, such architecture followed the principle of "form follows function." But that principle can be used to create a form which is aesthetically pleasing or it can be used to create a form that is either devoid of and/or mocks aesthetic virtue. Brutalism and buildings influenced by it does the latter. One of my earliest memories is being fascinated by the Dallas skyline at the age of 2 - so architecture is something I have always paid attention to. When I was growing up, buildings influence by Brutalism to some degree or another were everywhere - and the contrast between them and the older buildings is one of several things that made me curious about previous decades. I fell in love with the grandeur, craftsmanship and attention to detail which was evident on the older buildings. Happily, architecture began to experience a mini-renaissance sometime in the 1980s. There are buildings today that I can appreciate, some to a very significant degree. I see a lot of office buildings that have gone up and continue to go up in the Dallas area suburbs which I think are very sleek and attractive. Nevertheless, there is still fallout from the counterculture. My term for most of the modern buildings I like is "freeway architecture." They look great when one is driving by - but the moment one walks up close, one encounters the typically modern blandness and emotional sterility. Take an art deco skyscraper from the late 1920s or early 1930s. From a distance, they are frequently very striking and sleek. As you get closer, you begin to observe more and more subtle details which were not visible from a distance. As you get even closer, you begin to notice an incredible wealth of highly stylized details that are frequently breathtaking. Stand on the sidewalk right next to the skyscraper, and you will likely find that the metal borders around the windows, the doors, the light fixtures, even the door knobs are often splendid works of art in their own right. By contrast, even the best modern buildings tend to be one dimensional. If you see it from the distance, you have basically seen the building. As you get closer, well, all too often, all that happens is you have moved in closer. The buildings do not have the harsh ugliness of Brutalism - but the flat, empty blandness remains. And when there is detail, it tends to be smuggled in and apologized for. Rarely is it proudly and openly celebrated. Once again, it is another instance where the aesthetic experience is capable of appealing only to limited and sanitized sliver of the emotional spectrum. There are, of course, a lot of architectural retro rehashes being built today - most of them very bad. Personally, I think it is very sad that the only way for developers to incorporate a feeling of substance, elegance and "soul" into their projects is to smuggle it in through borrowed references from a better cultural past. On the other hand, the fact that people today feel the need to turn to the past and that there exists a growing number of people interested in all things "retro" is, I think, a very positive sign. I don't take it as an example of rabid Peter Keatingism as some occasional Objectivists I run across believe it to be. I view it as part of what Bob Tracinski called "the great re-learning." As was the case with the Renaissance many centuries ago, once our culture has gone through the process of rediscovering and developing an appreciation for all that was destroyed by bands of filthy savages and their heirs, maybe the best aspects of our culture can once again become forward looking and see new heights of achievement in areas other than technology. As for moderns who have never had a chance to discover the pre-counterculture world - well, I feel sorry for such people. But, then again, I don't necessarily pity them either. Think of a person who entered your life in adulthood (or, if you are a teenager, in the past couple of years or so) who you think the world of and your life has became richer as a result of knowing them. Now imagine, for a moment, that this person had never come into your life. What would your life be like today? Obviously, it would be diminished in those particular values that this person contributed. But then again, you would be totally oblivious of it because you would have never known that person and never experienced those particular values. Your life today would be less enjoyable and wonderful without your even having known it. And so it is, as well, with regard to the values which were wiped out or rendered obscure by the counterculture. It is very difficult to appreciate the loss of that which one has never known in the first place. And that is the sad and tragic legacy of the counterculture on all of our lives - some of us more so than others.