James Adkins

The best deterrent against the use of force is the ability and willingness to use force in retaliation. It has nothing to do with disagreements. When a man with a gun in his hand demands my wallet and I refuse to give it to him it is not a mere disagreement about who, in fact, owns the wallet. Are you saying I should try to reason with the man, maybe engage him in a conversation about the morality of initiating force?

I have been running it for a little over two years with 3,585 work units returned so far. I am running the command line interface (no CPU cycles are spent on graphics, just computations) with a program called SETIQueue to cache work units. Both are installed as services so they are always running in the background not just when my screensaver kicks in. Running them as services also means they start back up automatically when the computer is restarted and run whether or not anyone is logged in so I haven't even thought about it in a few months. The SETI team is currently testing something called BOINC which I am thinking of switching to. It runs two Projects: AstroPulse - the search for pulsars, ET, and black holes and the Southern Hemisphere Search which is similar to the current SETI but uses a much newer radio telescope in Australia. The telescope in Arecibo is built into the crater of an extinct volcano to support it's massive weight and is therefore limited to a fixed portion of the northern sky. The dish in Australia is similar to the telescopes at the Very Large Array in New Mexico in that the dish can be moved, so it will be able to cover the whole southern sky. My interest in physics, astronomy, and science fiction made running SETI@Home irresistible. The chances of success are slim, but I find the whole thing interesting. I will check out the cancer and small pox projects.

Capitalism Forever: I have always seen the differences between the examples you gave. If that is what Schwartz meant then I agree with it completely. I am glad I’m not the only one who thinks that there is nothing wrong with “voting for the least damaging candidate, or invoking the Fairness Doctrine in support of liberty”. It is unfortunate that many Objectivists use that essay to support the opposite position. One of the issues that was raised in the thread was that support for a Libertarian candidate constituted support for the Libertarian party and the Anarchists and was, therefore, immoral, whereas support for a Republican candidate was not support for the Republican Party or the Christians and, therefore, was not immoral. Of course, no one put it exactly like that, but that is what they were saying. It appears totally arbitrary. For example, I have been told that my support for a Libertarian candidate that is against the War on Drugs and gun control would be immoral because of the implicit sanction it would give to his lack of a moral base for his positions and to the Anarchists, Nihilists, etc., who happen to agree with those positions. That didn’t make any sense to me. It made even less sense when I found the quote from Ayn Rand about evaluating a political candidate. My support would only be for his political positions. It would also be better than supporting a candidate that supported the War on Drugs completely and claims to be against gun control but who votes for it repeatedly anyway. My position would be sort of like Rand’s in "Tax Credits for Education" (VoR pg. 249): Sort of like… The only argument that has swayed me is that every vote that goes to such a candidate is one the Democrats don’t have to get. This is particularly worrisome in the Presidential race because both the Democrat and the official Libertarian positions on terrorism are unacceptable. But in state and Congressional elections the choice of candidate x over a Republican, with the necessary qualifications, seems entirely appropriate and moral, in my opinion. If everyone who agrees with the politics of a Libertarian would vote for him, instead of being afraid of wasting their vote or giving a moral sanction it would, at the very least, make it clear that a sizable minority of the American people will not tolerate any more encroachments on our liberties or any moves to bring us closer to full socialism. It might even roll some of the more recent encroachments back a bit, which wouldn’t be a bad thing. Dismuke: I should note that I agree. My point was that if you remove the word "anarchists" from above and replace it with the word "Christian" the argument is still valid. The distinction appears arbitrary to me. Hopefully, what I said above will clarify what I meant. I appreciate everybody taking the time to read my long posts and respond. I look forward to any further comments.

I would like to thank those who responded, they brought up good points. It may just be a matter of personal preference, more a function of living in the Bible belt and being surrounded by fundamentalist Christians than anything else, but I would rather the Anarchists get some implicit support from my vote (although there is no reason not to make it _explicitly_ clear that it is not meant as such) than have to put up with one more Christian using Bush’s election as proof to him that the American people really want a Christian Republic after all, complete with a total repudiation of the Bill of Rights and their replacement with the 10 commandments. The current talk around here is that the FCC isn’t going far enough, if you can believe that. If there are people who are lucky enough to live in parts of the country where these people don’t make up at least 50% of the Republican Party, they should be very happy. Around here, I’m up to my armpits in them. The Anarchists seem to be a far smaller percentage of the Libertarians than the Theocrats are of the Republicans. Though, this may just be an issue of where we live and who we come in contact with on a daily basis. In any case, the real point of my post concerns the issue of sanction. I don’t want to give credibility to an immoral philosophy, either Nihilism or Fascism, but I do want to make an attempt to change the culture in positive way. How do I go about that? Is Schwartz’s essay “On Moral Sanctions” really so strict as to say that what Rand said in the first two quotes given at the bottom of my last post, and similar acts, is no longer acceptable? If so, do others here agree? If not, can someone please help me clarify what he is saying? I really want to resolve this issue so that I can start building the kind of world I would like to live in. James

After reading through this thread I am still left with a few questions. I think some of the issues raised by others were argued around but not touched on directly. At least, they still remain unclear in my mind. How is what Rand said in the quote about evaluating a political candidate (1) and what she said when she advocated co-opting the Fairness Doctrine (2) consistent with what Schwartz has to say about sanction (3)? I know she wasn’t being pragmatic; she wasn’t compromising her morality at all. I understand what she was doing and I agree with her, but Schwartz seems to demand a prohibition on exactly the sort of things said by Rand on both occasions. Is this correct? How is co-opting the Fairness Doctrine in order to bring about greater freedom alright, but co-opting of the Libertarian party for the same reasons not? I understand the faults of Libertarianism. I understand and agree with the need for a strong philosophical base for politics, that’s why I’m here. I know, and have met, Libertarians that want anarchy and advocate a position that would leave America weak and vulnerable to attack by terrorists and others. But, given a Libertarian who does not advocate those things (there are many) and, in fact, explicitly advocates the correct political positions (but not necessarily philosophical), where is the harm in sanctioning him with a vote, given what Rand said (1)? If the differences between Democrat and Republican on a few positions are great enough to warrant sanctioning Bush with a vote (as many here have advocated, in this thread as well as another), why aren’t the *political* differences between Republicans and Libertarians, which are far more in line with Rand’s *politics* than the Republican’s, great enough to warrant sanctioning the Libertarian candidate with a vote? This is assuming that he does not advocate Anarchy, eliminating the military, etc., and keeping in mind the quote below from Rand (1). Why is voting Libertarian a sanction of the worst among the Libertarians (Anarchist, Nihilists), but voting Republican is not a sanction of the worst among the Republicans (Christians, Fascists)? It can’t be the lack of a correct philosophical basis for their political beliefs. The Republicans certainly don’t have one either; nothing the Republicans have put forth even comes close. I appreciate any comments. This is my first post and I am still working on clarifying many issues. (1) One cannot expect, nor is it necessary, to agree with a candidate's total philosophy--only with his political philosophy (and only in terms of essentials). It is not a Philosopher-King that we are electing, but an executive for a specific, delimited job. It is only political consistency that we can demand of him; if he advocates the right principles for the wrong metaphysical reasons, the contradiction is his problem, not ours. A vote for a candidate does not constitute an endorsement of his entire position, not even of his entire political position, only of his basic political principles. (2) As applied to television and radio broadcasting the fairness doctrine demands that equal opportunity be given to all sides of a controversial issue -- on the grounds of the notion that the “people own the airwaves” and therefore all factions of the people should have equal access to their communal property. The “Fairness Doctrine” is a messy little makeshift of the mixed economy, and a poor substitute for freedom of speech. It has, however, served as a minimal retarder of the collectivist trend: it has prevented the Establishment’s total takeover of the airwaves. For this reason --- as a temporary measure in a grave national emergency ---the fairness doctrine should now be invoked on behalf of education. (3) This means the refusal to grant it, by word or by deed, any moral respectability. It is by scrupulously withholding from the irrational even a crumb of a moral sanction — by rejecting any form of accommodation with the irrational — by forcing the irrational to stand naked and unaided — that one keeps evil impotent.”