khaight

What evidence do you base this on? From the analysis I've read the only direct piece of evidence of his views on Roe are from a brief he wrote while working as an advocate for the first Bush administration -- which can't really be used as proof of his own views, since it's an advocate's job to argue for the position taken by his client. I expect Judge Roberts to be pro-life, simply based on the political considerations surrounding his nomination, but I'd like to see some evidence from his own earlier rulings and/or writings.

My experience with OpenOffice is that it is at least as compatible with Microsoft Office as the various versions of MS Office are with each other. Which is more than adequate unless you have a large number of very complex MS Office documents you need to convert. I've successfully used OpenOffice Impress (the Powerpoint analog) to both view and create (from Powerpoint templates)Powerpoint presentations. I've done this a number of times at work and have not received any complaints about interoperability. It's definitely worth taking for a test drive. Since it's free, if you decide you don't like it you can always take it back for a refund. So to speak.

I've had a limited-edition print of "A New Height" for several years now. I bought it for my wife as a Christmas gift. Really freaked my parents out, too, because going to an art gallery and buying a painting was utterly out of character for me. I told them that it isn't that I hate art; it's just that good art has been so hard to find. I really wish they would do a print series of Larsen's "Self-Absolution of the Titan". It's such a striking painting, I could sit and stare at it for hours.

My mother read me The Hobbit when I was 7 or 8 and I enjoyed it a lot. C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia was a good read, but be aware that Lewis was a Christian apologist and the Chronicles are an extended Christian allegory. They're still excellent children's books, IMHO, but you have to watch out for the subtext. Lewis' science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelanda and That Hideous Strength) should be avoided; they're dull as ditchwater. E. B. White's Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan are also good, as are many of Roald Dahl's works. Oh, and it would be a crime to leave out John D. Fitzgerald's The Great Brain and its many sequels. Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH is a classic, although I don't remember the author.

Neat. On a totally unrelated topic, I'm an engineer at Cisco with a focus on security. The three of us have *got* to get together and go bowling...

This is something that's always annoyed me. When I hear people talking about how love is selfless, my response is usually along the lines of "So, you're saying you'd rather go fishing or something, but since you're in love you're going to give up what you really want to do and spend time with your fiancee instead?" When I got married (about eight and a half years ago, and it's still going great, thanks for asking) my wife and I wrote our own ceremony. The first sentence was "Love is a profoundly selfish emotion." I'm still proud of that.

The writer/director of SIMONE, Andrew Niccol, seems to like playing with this theme. His earlier film, THE TRUMAN SHOW (which he wrote), illustrates a similar point about how nobody can win a war with reality. The villains in the film have all the advantages: time, money, people -- but they can't fake Truman's reality without his consent. The very tools they use to construct and run their artificial world become the mechanism of their undoing. Niccol's other film, GATTACA, is also worth watching. He's a talented screenwriter; unfortunately his directing style is very dark and static.

I concur with the analysis that older Objectivists just don't spend as much time on fora. When I was in my mid-to-late 20's I was a fairly active poster to humanities.philosophy.objectivism. Then I got bored with arguing the same points over and over and decided my time would be better spent actually applying Objectivism to the process of living on Earth. That's what it's really for, after all. I wandered back into this forum by way of somebody's weblog. I read threads that look interesting, and post infrequently. (Oddly enough, Pony Girl, I'm also 34 as is my Rand-sympathetic wife. Make of that what you will.)

Of course, their right to own property is in no way contingent on their beliefs. I'm not responsible for what they say and do; I am responsible for what I say and do. I do believe in the Right to One's Own Property, and I believe that right even applies to other people who disagree with me.

I'm in San Jose. I know of one pseudo-Objectivist group, the "Silicon Valley Objectivists", that have a monthly meeting of some kind. I went to a few of their meetings and wasn't very impressed; they seem to be largely TOC-variety "Objectivish" types. You might try contacting ARI to see if there's an operating campus club in the area. Beyond that, my only suggestion would be to try founding one yourself if you can find enough other interested people in the area.

Many years ago, Andy Bernstein had a short talk on "How To Spread Objectivism". One of the items he mentioned was for individuals to place copies of Atlas Shrugged in hotel rooms. (Actually, he went a step further and also advocated removing the Bibles; I have a clear memory of him at a conference holding up a Bible he had taken from his hotel room and getting a pretty good laugh from the audience. I'm not entirely comfortable with that myself. The Gideons are apparently OK with people taking the Bibles if they're going to read them, but taking them just to prevent other people from reading them smacks of theft. But I digress.) Andy's basic point, I think, is valid. You don't have to wait for ARI. If you travel frequently, buy a case of Rand's novels and leave them behind in hotel rooms like breadcrumbs. It's the individualist approach.

I hit your website and dug up the copy of your resume you have there. You're probably not a good match for what we're looking for -- my group is writing embedded management and control software in C and C++; your background is in information systems and web applications. The required knowledge bases are almost orthogonal.

I don't know from IT, but we've been trying to hire software engineers into my group at Cisco for the past month or so and we're having an amazingly hard time finding people even minimally competent. It's almost scary...

You might want to look at what Ayn Rand has to say about the relationship between the conscious and subconscious during the process of writing in the first chapter of The Art Of Fiction. It sounds very similar to what you describe above, just in a different domain. (For what it's worth, I have similar experiences writing computer software. When I'm "in the groove" the code seems to just pour out from my fingers onto the keyboard, without any conscious intervention. But that's because I've automatized a lot of complex theoretical knowledge about software engineering, which my subconscious mind can call on when I'm working.)

I experimented with TinyMUD for about six months while I was in college. I went through the exploration phase, the construction phase and the wizard phase. Then I got bored and moved on to something else. Essentially I was exploring the capabilities of the MUD as a software system and once I understood it I was finished.

Well, there's the Amber RPG, which uses a "diceless" system which often boils down to the GM deciding subjectively whether proposed character actions succeed or fail based on what makes for a more dramatic story. Not much objectivity there. I think there's a grain of truth in the comparison to chess (which I also played when I was younger and enjoyed a lot). Whenever you have a moderately complex rule-based system there's a risk that playing with the system will become an end in itself, replacing a focus on reality. This can happen with chess. It can happen with role-playing games, as anybody who has been to a gaming convention can attest. It can happen with computer programming. It can even happen with philosophy. (I think this may explain some of the more pathological characteristics of the analytic school.) But the risk doesn't mean these pastimes or disciplines are without value; it just means you have to keep them in their place. I game. I program computers for a living. I read philosophy. I even play a game of chess now and then. But I don't use these activities to escape from reality -- they're parts of reality that enhance my enjoyment of life.

I enjoyed the first two a lot, the third was OK, the fourth and fifth were largely a waste. Faith of the Fallen was a lot of fun, though, in a fugly Rand-pastiche sort of way. There's a nice extended sequence in it concretizing the harmony-of-interests principle which I think is far and away the best thing Goodkind's written so far. I haven't read beyond that, though. It's kind of scary to think that Goodkind is the most commercially successful living Objectivist novelist by a wide margin.

I also prefer the American RPGs, although I think the actual division is between PC RPGs and console RPGs. (Most Japanese CRPGs are written for consoles primarily; most American ones are written primarily for PCs.) There are also some German CRPGs that are pretty good (Gothic and Gothic 2 are both, IMHO, excellent.) Objectivists might be interested in Deus Ex, which is sort of a hybrid between a CRPG and an action shooter. The plot involves your character working as an agent for a United Nations anti-terrorist group and then discovering that all is not as it seems. A no-holds-barred game of cloak and dagger ensues, and a good time is had by all who don't get killed in the end. One of my favorite PC games ever. There was an old CRPG called Ultima IV that had an explicit system of virtues (some good, some very bad from an Objectivist standpoint). One of the groundbreaking aspects of the game was that it would assign you ranking in each virtue based on what you did as you played. I'm pleased to say that my "self-sacrifice" ranking for most of the game was "self-serving slug" -- and this was before I ever read Ayn Rand! In AD&D games I usually wind up playing "neutral good", which I interpret as someone interested in doing good while not being overly concerned about what the rules of society have to say about the proper way to do so. Interesting. I haven't played KOTOR2 yet (because I only have a PC, not an Xbox, so I have to wait for the PC version to come out in February), but once I do I'm definitely going to write my friend and find out which bits he was responsible for.

Sounds to me like you're talking about computer RPGs, whereas the original poster was talking about pen & paper RPGs. They're really two very different pastimes. A good pen & paper RPG really is a type of collective performance art, sort of like a bunch of people working together to improvise a play with no audience. I've been playing in a game of Spycraft that recently broke up, and I'm contemplating taking the plunge into gamemaster-hood. My game of choice for this is Champions (a super-hero RPG). I've always really liked the Hero ruleset, but haven't had a chance to actually play seriously with it before. Odd coincidence alert: the best pen & paper RPG I've played in was a multi-year Dungeons & Dragons game in college. The guy who ran it (who was also best man at my wedding) currently works as a level designer at the software development company that wrote Knights of the Old Republic II. We spent many many hours arguing moral issues in college. I have no idea whether that experience fed into his work on KOTOR2, or whether he was involved in the sequence you cited in your post, but it's an odd connection.

The group I work in at Cisco just got four new external headcount requisitions for software engineers. On the theory that Objectivists are likely to be high-quality producers, I thought I'd see if there were any software engineers in the area who might be interested in applying. We're located in the Santa Clara headquarters complex on Tasman Drive; people in the group (not counting the one crazy guy who comes down from Oregon) commute from between Palo Alto to the north and south San Jose to the south. We have a history of hiring very smart people even if their skillset isn't a perfect match. Ignorance is curable, but stupid is forever. Core skills are C/C++ coding and design abilities, good communication and a proactive attitude. Experience working with embedded software and hardware drivers would be a plus, as would experience with networking. We're willing to consider both junior and senior level applicants. For those who pay attention to the networking world, our group does the Cisco Catalyst 4000 line of products -- overall the most popular modular Ethernet switch in the history of the known universe. If anyone is interested, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected] with any further questions you have. I should be able to dig up formal job descriptions sometime in the next week.

For the history, I'd recommend Edward Eggleston's A History of the United States and Its People. It only goes up to 1890, but other than that it's a great match. If you're willing to spend a bit more money and move beyond books, Eric Daniels has been giving mini-courses on United States history at Objectivist conferences for several years now. I believe he's up to 3 out of a planned five. Look them up at the Ayn Rand Bookstore. I seem to recall that Ed Locke wrote a book on time management, but the title eludes me.

In my own case I had a handful of strong values before I encountered Ayn Rand. I valued science, logic and thinking. I thought honesty and consistency were important. Rand's writings taught me that the implications of those values were a lot broader and better integrated than I had previously realized. Repeatedly I found myself saying "Well, I guess if I want to keep believing X then I have to accept Y as well." It snowballed from there.

You self-describe as an Objectivist when in your judgement you understand, accept and consistently act on the principles of Objectivism. If other people judge that you do not in fact understand, accept and act on those principles, they will challenge your self-identification. Then you have to decide whether their judgement is correct or not. It's like making any other decision. There's no magic bullet or committee on-high that can imprint your forehead with the "Mark of Ayn". There's just individuals examining facts and drawing conclusions.

While there are a lot of hard-core leftists in California, there are also a lot of people who are really more motivated by anti-religious sentiments. They won't vote Republican because they associate the GOP with the religious right, but they will often vote in a more conservative way on ballot initiatives. (Examples include the anti-affirmative-action initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the recent voting down of a socialized health-care initiative imposed on small businesses.) Don't get me wrong, the state is a long way from a bastion of freedom. But there are a lot of decent, basically rational people here -- if you look for them. Heck, the Ayn Rand Institute is in Irvine, California!

It has its moments, but I've read more rewarding fiction by non-Objectivists. The more general point made above, that just because art is created by an Objectivist doesn't mean it will be good, is very true. While Objectivist-created art is refreshingly free of nihilism, the very power and explicitness of the philosophy creates a risk of didacticism. Some artists are better than others at avoiding this pitfall. Sometimes the same artist avoids it in some work and falls headfirst into it in others. A non-literary example of this: Compare Sylvia Bokor's Thank You Mr. Edison with her later Beginnings. I also recommend listening to Leonard Peikoff's lecture "The Survival Value of Great (Though Philosophically False) Art" for some powerfully-argued insights into why rejecting a work of art just because it's built on poor philosophical premises is a bad idea.