khaight

It's perfectly reasonably to cricitize (even harshly criticize) specific computer games for specific failures, e.g. I think the kind of world and gameplay modeled by the very popular Grand Theft Auto series is pretty dodgy from a moral and esthetic standpoint. (Stealing cars, shooting police and abusing prostitutes are just a few of the things the game encourages the player to do.) I think that finding such things entertaining says something bad about the character of the gamer too, but that doesn't mean we can't criticize the game for catering to such nihilistic values. This is similar to the way we can criticize works of literature that embody corrupt values (such as Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis) instead of restricting ourselves to criticizing the character of those who read such books. Bashing an entire genre is uncalled for unless there are essential characteristics of the genre as such that are bad. Computer games don't qualify. It sometimes seems like each generation of parents has to launch an ill-considered attack on whatever new form of recreation their children enjoy. At one point it was rock music. Later it became video games. In another decade it will be something else.

If you're willing to dig into secondary literature, you might consider Douglas Rasmussen & Douglas Den Uyl's Liberty and Nature. It's been described as post-Randian Aristotelianism. Max Stirner (author of The Ego And Its Own) was an advocate of what I guess you could call "predatory egoism". It doesn't bear much resemblance to what Rand was talking about, but then again neither does Nietzsche once you get past the superficial. Overall, though, it's pretty thin pickings. Egoism has not been a popular viewpoint in the history of ethics.

I agree completely with the principle that Stephen laid out. More concretely I would say that the following policies if applied systematically would signify that the line had been crossed. (This isn't intended to be an exhaustive list.) - Comprehensive censorship. - Major restrictions on the right of free association and assembly. - "Secret police" and the disappearance or arrest of political opponents. - Total corruption of the electoral or vote-counting systems. These sorts of actions would either destroy the ability to change people's minds, or they would destroy the people's ability to change the course of the nation *after* changing their minds. It's also worth considering in this context Ayn Rand's identification of the four characteristics which brand a country as a dictatorship (from "Collectivized Rights" in VoS): - One party rule - Executions without trial for political offenses - Nationalization or expropriation of private property - Censorship. (On reflection, this sounds exactly like what's happened to Zimbabwe over the past few years as it descended into dictatorship. Score another point for Rand!)

As phrased, this is a silly question. People do things for a wide variety of reasons, and with a question this general there isn't much point to speculating. A more interesting (and answerable) question might be: What are some of the values provided by computer games that lead people to play them? Another question might be: What are some of the negative aspects of computer games that lead people to criticize them? I have been an avid player of what are called "computer role-playing" games for many years now. I find them enjoyable for the sense of immersion they provide. The best of these games create virtual worlds in which I can experience dramatically significant action with myself as the protagonist. I get to save the world, kill the bad guy, and live happily ever after. The value they provide is not primarily physical, or even cognitive: it's spiritual fuel in the same way as reading a good novel. Artistically these games are usually pretty shallow, but the sense of immersiveness and control compensates for that. I have also played some more intellectual "puzzle" style games, such as the old-but-classic "The Incredible Machine", which provide a different kind of value. The goal there is more like chess -- experiencing the pleasure of using one's mind to solve a complex problem with no broader ramifications. There's nothing wrong with that as a delimited form of recreation. I also can't resist tossing in this observation on the benefits of twitch-style shooter games from a serviceman currently in Iraq, taken from http://www.justanothersoldier.com/blog040512.htm: I'll leave it to others with interest to discuss their perceptions of the negative aspects of computer games.

Ok, Stephen, you got me. I was imprecise. Let me try again. The original poster seemed to be concerned that our inability to perceive the universe in its entirety somehow undercut its concreteness. My point is that most (if not all) concretes cannot be perceived by humans in their entirety. We can't see the back sides of opaque objects. We can't see many wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation reflected from things. And so on. This fact doesn't undermine the concreteness of the universe (or anything else). Just as the fact that I can't perceive the opposite side of my monitor doesn't mean I can't perceive the monitor, the fact that I can't perceive the entire universe doesn't mean I can't perceive the universe. Requiring that we be able to perceive everything about a concrete before we can be considered to perceive it at all is just an application of an omniscient standard of knowledge to the issue of perception.

That does look a lot better than the old version. The lecture of Peikoff's they put up is (IMHO) one of his better ones. I found it very clarifying the first time I heard it, and I've always meant to pick up a copy someday. Now I guess I can just download it.

Note in this connection that we can't perceive most entities in their entirety at any given moment. Right now I can only see the front of my computer monitor; I can't see the back. If I turn it around I will be able to see the back but not the front. This doesn't undermine the entity-ness of the monitor in any way. Similarly, our inability to perceive the entire universe at one time doesn't undermine its entity-ness either.

Keeping employees on the payroll when they aren't strictly necessary right now can still be a sound business move. A company with large cash reserves might choose to retain some technically unnecessary employees through a downturn if they thought having them in place would leave them better positioned to reap additional profits in a future economic recovery, for example. That would be a gamble that might or might now pay off depending on the strength and timing of the recovery, but accurately projecting such future trends is one of the functions of good corporate management. (Also, on the topic of it not being in the self-interest of employees to drive their employers into bankruptcy: employees often either don't know or don't care about this. Exhibit A is the way that some of the employee-owned airlines (Delta?) are effectively being driven out of business because the employee-owners are insisting on short-term economic security over badly-needed longer-term restructuring. They're so busy fighting over slices of a shrinking pie that none of them can see the future where they all starve to death.)

One other thing to bear in mind is the difference between ex ante and ex post assessments of actions. It's one thing to look back at an action in the past and conclude that it worked out; it's something else to conclude that an action is a good idea before you take it. Ethical principles are concerned with guiding action ex ante. Putting the point in a different context: just because one person ate some random mushrooms, got lucky and survived doesn't mean it's a good idea to eat random mushrooms. Similarly even if one man managed to rob a bank, get lucky and get away with it, it wouldn't make robbing banks a good survival strategy. This isn't the most fundamental argument against the "prudent predator" scenario, but it's an important distinction that (I find) is often overlooked.

Steve Forbes in 1996 was a very different candidate from Steve Forbes in 2000. In 1996 he ran a campaign focused largely on fiscal conservatism. Key issues as I recall were the flat tax, social security privatization and a restoration of the gold standard. He definitely wasn't running as a social conservative. His late entrance to the race and his lack of connections inside the Republican party doomed his candidacy from the outset. I was hopeful in the intervening years as Forbes built himself a political organization that was clearly intended to serve as a better springboard for another run in 2000. He spent time campaigning on behalf of other Republican candidates in the 1998 election cycle, and was building bridges inside the party apparatus -- working to correct some of the structural problems that damaged his 1996 campaign. I tried to help him along by donating money from time to time. I (and a lot of other Objectivists) were dismayed when his 2000 campaign was built around defining himself as the 'true' representative of religious and social conservatism. He tried to broaden his appeal within the primaries by kowtowing to religion, and that turned off a lot of his 1996 supporters (including me). These days, with the increased focus on foreign policy engendered by 9/11, I honestly don't know how well Forbes would stack up as a candidate. Not well is my guess. Which may explain why we haven't heard much about him in the last 4 years. (Every now and then some conservative floats the idea of him running for governor or senator from New Jersey, which I gather is his state of residence, but nothing ever comes of it.) With reference to the broader question of which contemporary politician would I like to see as President -- it's a sad commentary on the state of American politics that I can't really come up with a candidate I'd find exciting. There are ones who would be better or worse on individual issues, but nobody who really ties everything together into an exciting integrated package. For pure entertainment I'd kind of like to see Condi Rice run against Hillary Clinton in 2008, just because it would be fun watching the Democrats try to figure out how to run against an intelligent, articulate conservative black woman. But that's a purely emotional reaction, not a reasoned one.

Speaking personally I don't have a problem with your having socialist tendencies as such, as long as you're polite and stick to facts and logic in discussion.

I don't vote for parties, I vote for candidates (and ballot issues). In terms of party registration I've been all over the map: Republican, Libertarian, Decline to State, and I'm currently a registered Democrat. (My party affiliation is driven mainly by whether there is a primary election coming up in which I want to support a particular candidate. My current registration is a result of my wanting to support Edwards over Kerry in the presidential primary, based on my perception that of the two of them Edwards was the more moderate.) On the specific question of Bush vs. Kerry, at this point I'm undecided. I had been planning to support Bush for war reasons, but that's becoming more of a toss-up as time goes by. It seems clear that we will be largely out of Iraq by November. The key war question we face now is: what next? Kerry doesn't seem to have a clue, but frankly at this point I'm not sure Bush does either. I'm hoping that one of the candidates will lay out a more detailed set of future plans by the election. If not, I may wind up rolling dice.

Rand's Question is very useful: "What are the facts of reality that give rise to the need for this concept?" Always, when analyzing an argument, drive the key concepts back to concretes. One psychological observation I've found useful for identifying floating abstractions is the rise of disproportionate anger or anxiety when attempting to argue a particular point. That's usually a sign that there's something in the argument I don't fully understand, and taking a step back and asking Rand's Question is often fruitful in such cases.

The main book Rand herself wrote on epistemology was Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. It's an in-depth examination of the Objectivist theory of concepts. There are a number of other issues in epistemology that don't yet have detailed treatments or which Rand herself didn't discuss in depth, such as the nature of perception and the nature of propositions. With respect to government financing in a free society, I suggest starting with Rand's article "Government Financing in a Free Soceity" in The Virtue of Selfishness. In a free society roads would be privately-owned, yes. Your final question deals in essence with the conditions for starting a revolution. A government that is arbitrarily and systematically killing the citizens whose rights it is supposed to be defending has forfeited its right to exist. You don't have to wait for the government to get around to you before starting to resist. A parallel case can be constructed on the individual level. Suppose someone brandishes a gun at you in a threatening way. Do you have to wait for them to pull the trigger before taking defensive action? Obviously not.

I read some of the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was growing up, but they didn't have a profound effect on me. The main problem I had with them was that Arthur Conan Doyle often cheated by giving Holmes access to information which the reader did not have. This undermined my appreciation of the stories as mysteries because they didn't play fair. I much preferred Agatha Christie's "Hercule Poirot" novels. Christie was honest, in that by the time Poirot was ready to give his speech unmasking the killer at the end of the book the reader always had access to the facts required to solve the mystery. Christie's genius was in making the facts available while still coming up with a surprising (yet logical) resolution. Like Holmes, Poirot was an exponent of the power of the reasoning mind. "Never underestimate the power of the little grey cells, Hastings..."

While I was growing up, two of my central values were rationality and integrity, although I didn't think of it in those terms at the time. But I knew thinking and intelligence were important, and I knew I didn't like people or movements that said one thing and then did another. I wanted things to be consistent and to "make sense". I also had a strong streak of anti-authoritarianism, derived from a dislike of people telling me to do things instead of presenting reasons why I should do things. By the time I was in high school the above ingredients were pushing me towards a pragmatic conservatism in politics. I didn't like the liberals but lacked a principled and coherent alternative, thus leading to a simple opposition to what I saw as grandiose, unworkable and dishonest schemes. Psychologically I was curdling into cynicism. Then my junior year in high school a girl I knew spent 6 months pestering me to read The Fountainhead on the grounds that it was the "most rational" thing I'd ever read. Finally I gave in. Three weeks later I'd read it, Anthem and Atlas Shrugged and was digging into the non-fiction. It probably took another decade before I started to really understand it properly, but that was definitely the turning point.

I was 9 days shy of 10 when Reagan was sworn into office in 1981. I have only vague memories of the way the country was during the Carter administration, so I don't have a good direct experience of the sea change his election represented. I was one of the children who grew up in Reagan's shadow. A lot of my first impressions of America are impressions of Reagan's America -- the growing optimism, the vibrant economy (Silicon Valley in the 1980's), the sense of progress and increasing possibilities. By the time I was old enough to grasp the nature of the Cold War it was essentially over. I never really viewed the Soviet Union as a serious threat because by the time I understood what it was it was so obviously on its last legs. Given the conflicts we face today, I wish we had him back. He was among other things a war leader, and we could use one of those right now.

I've actually got a slightly more specific question for the group. All the D-Day anniversary coverage has revived my old interest in World War II, and I'd like to do some more detailed study of the history of the war. Does anybody have a recommendation of a good, comprehensive and objective history of WWII?

One additional observation. In a free society, the government is an instrument created and used by citizens to protect their rights. In a very real sense, the government is the property of the citizens. And just as with other forms of property, non-owners cannot appropriate it and use it without the consent of the owners. It would be obviously absurd, for example, for a Canadian province to unilaterally declare itself part of the United States, and thus to assign to the U.S. government the task of protecting the rights of people living in said province. Extending the responsibility of the government in such a way requires the consent of its current owners in some form; in that case it would probably be some sort of annexation procedure. But if a non-citizen can't unilaterally require the U.S. government to protect his rights by declaration, why should he be able to do so unilaterally through geographic movement? This is where the root sanction for, if not immigration at least naturalization law comes from. (Another reductio on totally open immigration: imagine a group of a hundred thousand communists with guns gathered on the other side of the U.S./Mexican border. They all say they want to enter the country. They claim to be peaceful. We can't reject them for being communist because a free society allows freedom of belief. We can't reject them for being armed, because a free society protects the right to keep and bear arms. So we have to let the invading army into the nation without resistance, and only act if they start committing crimes inside our jurisdiction. The obvious absurdity of such a conclusion suggests that governments can reasonably restrict immigration for the purpose of protecting the rights of its citizens.)

If you're willing to consider science fiction, I'd suggest a recent trilogy by John C. Wright: The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant and The Golden Transcendence. The author obviously has a first-rate classical education, and the books are rich, deep and satisfying explorations of the nature of man, mind, freedom and nature in a far-future environment. Some of the philosophical discussions are very reminiscent of Rand (the phrase "sanction of the victim" appears at one point, which in my experience is distinctively Randian), but they aren't derivative. I recommend them very highly; they're underappreciated gems of the genre.

One other film I dug out of my collection over the long weekend and rewatched: Tremors. It's a cheesy monster flick, but a surprisingly good one. The thing that raises it above the herd is that the theme is the power of intelligence as a survival tool. Whenever the protagonists think and act on the results of their thought, their situation improves. Whenever they fail to think, or try to rest on the benefits of prior thought, their situation worsens. It's also pretty funny, riffing on the themes of the genre (e.g. the graduate student who is constantly baffled by why everybody else thinks she knows something about the monsters just because she's a scientist). And, of course, the good guys win in the end.

This time around, I am a war voter. I've got a bumper sticker that says "Vote this November as if you life depended on it." I will be casting my vote in whatever way seems most likely to lead to continued and successful prosecution of the war. Whether a vote for Bush or Kerry results from that criterion I leave as an exercise for the student.

No need to look them up. As I said it's been some time since I read either of them, so I'm willing to believe that I forgot a Rand quote. Still, the echoes of Objectivism in the book were so faint that a reader who didn't know Kelley claimed to be an Objectivist would never notice them. My first reaction to Unrugged Individualism was to compare its title to Rand's major ethical book The Virtue of Selfishness. Rand's title was iconoclastic, in-your-face and unapologetic. Kelley's title, by contrast, struck me as weak and appeasing in tone. He wants to defend individualism, but my goodness we wouldn't want people to think it was rugged or anything. How uncouth! Rugged individualists don't get invited to cocktail parties very often, you see. The book itself seemed like it was targetted to university "Intro to Ethics" courses as an academically-acceptable 'token' work on ethical egoism. I'd have to reread it to make any cogent comments on the quality of the argument itself.

This point wasn't made in the introduction to the book, but it came to mind in relation to the Islamicists. Peikoff wrote that one of the effects of Germany philosophy was that it allowed Naziism to present itself as a form of moral idealism. Opponents of the Nazis characterized Hitler as 'misguided' and 'extreme', but they couldn't reject him as fundamentally wrong because they shared the same underlying premises. Being misguided or extreme just indicates a political dispute, but being accepted as moral idealists is a tremendous sanction. A similar dynamic exists today between the 'moderate' Muslims and the Islamicists. Bush keeps trying to claim the Islamicists are 'hijacking' Islam, but this isn't really true. The Islamicists are in many cases simply more faithfully executing religious dogma which even the moderates accept as valid. This results in the moderates condemning terrorism as an ineffective means, but not attacking it as morally unacceptable or un-Islamic. And just as in the case of the Nazis, a dispute over means within the context of deeper shared moral premises plays into the hands of the more consistent advocates.

It's been a while since I read them, but I do remember thinking that A Life of One's Own read very much like a libertarian tract against the welfare state. There was little if anything in it that struck me as distinctively Objectivist; it could have been written by any of a number of libertarians and come out essentially the same. There's nothing inherently wrong with writing a political monograph that doesn't make distinctively Objectivist arguments, but it seems to me that it would be better/more effective for Objectivists to make such arguments and leave the more generic stuff to others. Comparative advantage and all that.