DiscoveryJoy

O.K., granted, the East India Company as kind of a monopoly is a form of government-granted privilege. Or is that what you mean by "monopoly on trade"? There were also subsidies in U.S. industries like in the railway business. The question is how to weight those things. On the other hand, you have Britain's repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 as an expression of the general policy for free trade that allowed them to dominate foreign economies through free trade alone. Take the gunboat diplomacy leading to the Opium Wars in China and the establishment of Hong Kong as a trading post. As for the Sepoy Revolt in India, how does the lesson drawn according to you, "there is no foreign trade without political and military oversight", a restriction on free trade? The presence of a military to enforce free trade is not an abolition of free trade, it merely ensures it. Just like the police forces you not to commit theft so people are free to earn the rewards of their labor. Contrast that with the imposition of protectionist import tariffs under Hamilton's American System to protect domestic infant industries. And how did Europe continue like Hamilton in Banking more than the U.S.? With interstate-banking laws and the culmination in Glass-Steagall (although that's already 20th century), European banks seemed to have a big competitive advantage, didn't they? Also don't see the semi independence of the Federal Reserve, with all key positions in it appointed by government. Well, all in all, it would be nice to have some kind of benchmark that evaluates the economic impact of each restriction, law, regulation etc. in the economy and weighs it so one can better compare who's actually been freer. A kind of historical benchmark for the period between the late 18th and 19th centuries.

And yet another one between failing to oppose it and failing to have the intention of opposing it.

No need to abstain from the word "terrorism" or from replacing it with a whole bunch of different terms, as explained in my previous post. As for the justification, that was actually my question. But it rested on you understanding S.A.'s role in it. Remember me telling you about the magic keys: "Ctrl + F"? Certainly not hours. But that's just some texts for you for crosschecking, you should listen to people in the field who actually know what is going on in the region and had to deal with it, while at the same time have no religious agenda going on. As I also posted to you a statement by Israeli Army veteran Yaron Brook. Watch some debates like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=macoMMlnlMc. And look at what fundamentalists preach in the mosques and incite for in masses without being put in jail in their countries...You think this would go unpunished in the West and tell me "oh no, those states are certainly not supporting terrorism (or whatever you like to call it?)". Damn, I'm not a public library here It is fully established, I've given you some facts, softwareNerd has given you futher ones that elaborate on the audio statement I posted here. So there's no desperation at all. I'm not here to write an essay for you, just look out there ;-) Not seriously trying to prevent funding in the range of billions from going to terrorists as a state definitely IS supporting it. Unless you're admitting your incompetence and allowing foreign professionals/armies/policemen or whatever necessary into the country to do the police job for you that you cannot do, you're actually giving the go-ahead by neglecting your duties as a state. Again, no need for smart-arsing about non-essentials here, so I didn't switch at all. If anything, I've only gone deeper to the roots of it.

There's no point smart-arsing about "terrorism" vs "Islamic Fundamentalism" vs "Jihad" here as if they were unrelated. Terrorism is already implicit in Islamic Fundamentalism and Jihad (let's not start now with "inner" vs "outer" Jihad on top of all this, we all know what version applies in this context) as the means to achieve the end. If someone supports one of the latter two, he automatically supports the former implicitly. It bears no relevance which one you support first as a state, the existential end result is terrorist attacks, i.e. the same. But if you love hairsplitting so much (which I clearly don't understand why), I can give you "Wahhabi Islam", "Radical Islam", "Islamic extremism", "Totalitarian Islam" and you name it Don't see how such non-essentials in difference would undermine the inescapable faith-force nexus common to all of them. You need to start finding the one in the many, as opposed to being concrete-bound about such things.

Terrorism isn't even the key evil. Terrorism is just a tactic to achieve evil ends which are much clearer identified when addressing it as Jihad or Islamic Fundamentalism. The term "War on Terror" is rubbish to begin with and should be properly replaced by "War on Islamic Fundamentalism". As for your socalled "proper meaning" of Jihad, let Jihad decide what it really wants to be once it has been dealt with properly by the West. Well, if you don't want to read them, that's not my problem at all. I've given you the information you asked for. Let those who have eyes see. Or those who have ears hear and look into it (taken from http://www.peikoff.com/podcasts/page/3/?sort=recent#list): http://13be01ddf3b1d677ded1-f884a1b570187d379829b71385ab845d.r57.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/2015-19-1.356_E.mp3 It is not my duty to reproduce it all again here for you in this forum in condensed form, just because it would take you "hours" to go through it yourself as an excuse to remain ignorant about the facts. (Ever used Ctrl+F and "Saudi Arabia" in your browser?) As for the others, I think most people here understand very well the role of Saudi Arabia in state sponsored terrorism, so we can close this utterly suprising distraction from the main topic of this thread.

Saudi Arabia - along with Iran - is among the top countries supporting Islamic Jihadism, one way or another: http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/242073 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cables-saudi-terrorist-funding http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-yousaf-butt-/saudi-wahhabism-islam-terrorism_b_6501916.html

Any more leads to the topic?

Right.

It was supposed to be an example, not a shift. The example shows a sequence in which adjusting your means of perception and undergoing the act of perception take turns as two separate processes over and over again. But all this doesn't really solve the dilemmas I described in posts http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=8011&p=333818 and http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=8011&p=333943.

The effect of conceptual intents on motoric and sensual mechanisms you describe granted, but that doesn't mean that the perceptual level requires the conceptual level (That would be exactly Hume's, Locke's and Kant's position as I understand them). You only have a choice were to look but not what to find where you're looking, i.e. given a particular sensual direction and state of attention. The entities you perceive given such a sensual "camera setup" are still automatic and unchosen thereafter. You cannot "focus" on isolated sensations like an infant. In case this is just a problem of terminology, I would say this: You do not choose the objects of perception by first adjusting your means of perception prior to engaging in the actual act of perception. I'd say the sensual adjustment is one thing. The actual perceptual process following it is another. E.g. you focus on the world map on your screen and certain green and certain blue patches just spring to you. You zoom into one of those green patches and certain light green, certain dark green and certain maybe more red or brown patches spring to you. You zoom into one of the brown patches and certain buildings and roads just spring to you. And on and on. All the while, you may also use your own eyes instead of the zoom button to direct your attention to e.g. a particular building on the map. Same story, its rooftop, its front yard etc. just spring to you. You cannot choose what entities spring to you in a given area, but only the area in which things should spring up.

My God, I thought that this was so common knowledge among these circles that it doesn't need any further answering. I thought everybody here is clear that it is the big two: Saudi Arabia and Iran, who are the top states sponsoring terrorism in the world. The Saudis more secretively through channeling money through - internally and abroad - to institutions that preach violence against the West, and to terrorist training facilites etc. - all while in public pretending to be good friends. The name "Bin Laden" in tango with the Saudi Family doesn't ring a bell? Iran clearly outspoken about its hatred of the West and with no reason or even possibility to make this any big secret ever since the 1979 hostage crisis.

I am not talking about the perception of derived entities here, just of the primary ones. But in any case, I don't see how this changes my points about the object-means-form chain of perception here. Whatever entities we are talking about - primary or derived. But even if you purposefully guide your senses to certain details, aren't you just affecting the kind of automatic interaction on the part of your senses, so the just objects interact with your senses differently, i.e. producing a different entity-effect about which you then have no choice but to see?

Act of selective focus? Percepts are automatic forms of awareness. There's nothing we can select about them. The term "to focus or not" belongs to the conceptual level of awareness. Nothing to do with perception. And as for the atoms, its just the equivalent story to what I described earlier: "There is an amount of things (i.e. one or more objects) of such a kind that, if I were small enough and had those microsopically little senses equivalent to the large ones I have right now, and when that amount of things was to act on those micro-senses, I would perceive those things in the form of an atom." Observe that whether we are talking about perceiving apples or just single atoms - it seems we can never actually know for certain whether what we perceive as an "entity" through our senses is actually a coherent object independent of our senses. The "entity-effect" produced by the interaction of external objects with our senses might theoretically be caused by multiple and completely separate objects. In other words, from a multitude of sources all bombarding our senses at once, so the result just happens to be "a tree" while in reality, there are five, six, or a hundred external objects involved that produce that "tree" in interaction with our senses. Maybe the latter isn't a realistic thing to happen, because the separate objects should stimulate our senses in separately identifiable concentrations/intensities so we can still keep them apart. But then again, our sensual aparatus might as well be able to neutralize that through its own structure. Or the mere fact that the external objects interact with our senses all at once might mix the whole thing up into one thing already. Observe also what the whole object-means-form chain of perception means: It means that everything we are currently not perceiving live can be identified only on a would-be basis. For example, if your mum tells you on the phone that dad is just jumping to the ceiling out of joy for the birthday gift you send him, what does that mean? It means that whatever you are doing in your mind to imagine that scene doesn't actually exist in that form. It is only if you were there right now to see it, only then, would there actually be dad jumping to the ceiling. So long as you are just listening to mum on the phone, there are just certain objects doing certain stuff that would be dad jumping to the ceiling, if only you were there. It is only like a potentiality, not an actuality. Not really happening like I'm imagining it. Just happening right now in some form unknowable to me. Given this background, out there in New York, there is no such thing as the "Empire State Building" as I know it - only certain objects that would be the Empire State Building for me if I saw it. No such thing as a meteorite approaching earth about to hit me - only certain objects that will soon become a meteorite doing that to me once I get to stare at it in fear. One could say the same about the Vikings beating the Patriots seen on TV or about listening to Roosevelt's infamy speech on radio living during WW2. The object-means-form chain allows us to protect us from foreseable harm - but it doesn't allow us to enjoy the existence of pleasant events outside of our field of view. As I said, everything outside of our current field of view can be identified on a would-be basis only. And this - by the way - makes it all the more important to have other people around in remote places, so at least they can create some actuality to those things by perceiving them.

Well, with the last chapter of the Campus Philosophy Course (the one about Objectivism) and other courses now online, I think it has become clearer to me already. Viewing entities as a product of interaction between senses and the external world, i.e. an effect, makes the "how" irrelevant again. You just have the interaction on the one hand, and its continuous product on the other. One more question, though: "There is an object of such a kind that when it acts on my senses, I experience it in the form of a red apple." How do we know that there is just one object, in other words, how do we know that we are experiencing just "it" alone? How do we know it couldn't be a multitude of objects, that when they interact with our senses we experience them in the form of just one red apple? Since our consciousness is never in direct contact with primary causes, how do we know that the primary cause we perceive through our senses is really just one single object interacting with our senses? Couldn't it be multiple objects, but the interaction with our senses still creates the effect of a single object? Wouldn't we have to correct our statement to: "There is an amount of things (i.e. one or more objects) of such a kind that when they act on my senses, I experience them in the form of a red apple?" If so, it couln't even be said that two people are really receiving the same object in different forms. It would be "what is an entity to you, isn't an entity to me". Two people might not be talking about the same objects. Also, the senses themselves also need to be perceived by some means in some form. But since all we get is the product of interaction between objects and our senses, the senses themselves can never be the object of our perception to be perceived in any form. Or can they? All we perceive is then just some kind of "proxy objects" to our senses, which - when they act on our actual senses - we perceive in the form of eyes, ears, noses etc. Or anything wrong with that?

And what about the Saudis sponsoring Terrorism? Are they not equally responsible as Bin Laden? Would you say they are not a prime mover, just because they didn't pull the trigger? Who is the prime mover? Is it only Attila, or also the Witch Doctor? And doesn't Saudi Arabia already perform Attila activity through its sponsorship of Terrorists? And if sponsorship makes you a prime mover, then again, what stops you from putting the West into that prime mover boat, given that it supports Saudi Arabia (knowing that Saudi Arabia will use that money to sponsor Terrorism, they themselves knowing that the Terrorists will use that money for terrorist activity)?

BTW, I'm not sure now, whether in ( A ) I used to equate the sensual with the perceptual level or the perceptual with the conceptual one, or any of that, but I hope you still get my approach.

After reaching the lectures on Hume and Kant in the ARI Campus', I recently began to think about exactly this question of whether somebody could be put into a Matrix or not: http://campus.aynrand.org/classroom/22/ (BTW, excellent series, thank you very much ARI!) What I have come to discover in particular, is the distinction between the sensual and the perceptual level summarized somewhere at the end of the Hume lecture. There is also an entry on perception that deals with that distinction in the Ayn Rand lexicon: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/perception.html What I am still confused about is Objectivism's actual position on percepts: A “perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. I am not sure what to make of this. I am confused about the fact that Objectivism makes such an assertion on this relationship between sensations and perceptions, as if the latter is just a composition of elements from the former. Doesn't this mean that percepts, e.g. a particular tree or a building, are really just pieces of sense data all over again? I mean, the idea that they are grouped, retained and integrated and thereby experienced as a "whole" - how would any of that in essence make percepts anything different than sense data? It seems then that perceptions are merely a form of experiencing sense data. So after the baby stage, all we have really developed is just new forms of experiencing sense data? Maybe it would also help to explain the difference between "grouped" and "integrated" here. Does "grouped" refer to space (the leaves, branches etc. of the tree in a single snapshot) and "integrated" to time (multiple snapshots put together)? Otherwise I don't see why one of the two words shouldn't be enough. ( A ) Before the lecture, I kind of used to equate the sensual with the perceptual level, but still distinguished it from the conceptual one. According to Peikoff, this is Locke's position. I had considered the experience of entities to be a conscious, willful and conceptual achievement, i.e. that we learn to integrate our sensations into concepts to such a degree throughout our early years that at some point we automatically see certain entities. I also considered the sense organs to be just another form of sense data and, e.g., the experience of a smell (one sense data object) to be a learned necessary correlation to the presence of a nose (another sense data object). But still I didn't see a need for any subjectivity: If all is just sense data, then there can be no need to bother about some distinction between an external world vs an internal one in our minds, since all - sensations and sense organs - are just external sense data, i.e. external to our consciousness of them. Called "sense" data btw., only because of its discovered correlation to our senses: It simply is the case that any sense data only enters our consciousness if those particular sense data objects called sense organs are also available. Otherwise reality for some reason doesn't permit us to experience the data. Just like in an ego shooter computer game, the screen turns black once your character is shot down and disappears from the screen. Of course, I didn't think that the world exists only as long as we perceive it, since like in the computer game, the software program, i.e. the sense data itself, still continues to exist. We merely loose contact with it. I would like to compare my view of the unexplained necessity of the sense organs to the Ayn Rand lexicon's entry on sensations: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sensations.html where it talks about ostensive definitions: Sensations are the primary material of consciousness and, therefore, cannot be communicated by means of the material which is derived from them. The existential causes of sensations can be described and defined in conceptual terms (e.g., the wavelengths of light and the structure of the human eye, which produce the sensations of color), but one cannot communicate what color is like, to a person who is born blind. To define the meaning of the concept “blue,” for instance, one must point to some blue objects to signify, in effect: “I mean this.” Such an identification of a concept is known as an “ostensive definition.” What I am saying is, it is not clear why wavelengths produce sensations of color, or how any scientific discovery could ever explain why this is so. This is because you cannot construct the meaning of any particular blue without first knowing blue. For the same reasons, you cannot explain why the sense organs we know and our brain have to be there in order for us to have consciousness. It's just a learned correlation. It just is the case. Not that I'm saying it happens to be so - since everything has a nature and must act according to it so therefore it must be so - but I don't see how we could logically deduct why it must be so from any other given facts. Neither physics nor biology can deal with the essence of consciousness - its actual meaning - by themselves. Only philosophy can. So the whole apparatus of sensory perception and processing in the brain becomes a side issue to me and of lesser relevance to the philosophic debate regarding the question at hand. So with pieces of sense data and our consciousness of them being the only two fundamental things there really are, and sense data as such being quite a simple thing to recreate, creating the Matrix seemed quite possible to me. Consciousness remains consciousness of something that exists, but the only kind of something necessary to create and exist is sense data. Anything else, such as entities, is then conceptualized from that. So there's no conflict here. Although it seemed questionable to me whether building the Matrix with all its energy requirements wouldn't actually just mean rebuilding the world that already exists, so the whole effort might turn out to be pointless. ( B ) Then, through the lecture, came the distinction between the sensual and the perceptual level and the idea that entities are the result of an automatic process, i.e. that we experience entities directly without prior conceptualization. I am still considering this idea but I do not believe the perception of an "entity" to really mean a composition of sensations experienced as a whole, but merely of some whole that could not be reduced to any composition of sense data, but simply to "that thing", i.e. "that tree" or "that building". Something that cannot be fully identified otherwise and for which no allegedly retained, grouped and integrated sensations can really fully describe or explain any such experience as of "that thing". So there's also an analogy here: Just as certain wavelengths don't define blue but merely correlate to it, so those pieces of retained, grouped and integrated sense data don't define an entity but merely correlate to it. So I'm puzzled how the Ayn Rand lexicon can define perceptions the way it does. The kind of relationship of experiences to the sense organs I described earlier remains unchanged to me, it's merely just direct entities experienced now, not conceptual ones. But all this makes building the Matrix a problem: Since consciousness is still consciousness of something that exists and entities are things irreducible to sense data, you need to have real entities in the real world to feed the Matrix, in other words, no Matrix at all, but a real world. So in this my second view, no one can be put into a Matrix. ( C ) But then, as I said at the beginning, looking at the Ayn Rand lexicon's definition of perceptions that apparently reduces entities to sense data essentially, the Matrix seems possible again if one believes what that lexicon entry seems to imply about entities: If perceptions are in essence reducible to sensations and if artificially creating sensations is not a problem, then retaining, grouping and integrating them artificially to create any percept of desire shouldn't be a problem either, or should it? But then, it would also completely raise questions of what it actually means to be a tree or a building or at least about how these things relate to the rest of the world. They could be both particular kinds of things that exist out there independent of us created by nature or architects through a lenghty process - or they could be particular kinds of things that exist out there independent of us created by the Matrix out of the blue at any moment. But to me, the earlier version ( B ) of what I think about entities seems most sensible to me, so the Matrix is out. Or am I wrong here anywhere theoretically? What the heck should I make of the Ayn Rand lexicon's definition of perceptions?

Thank you, this, indeed, gets much closer to answering my question. You see, my problem is, then, that you cannot really complain about 9/11, other than just confess that you only have yourself to blame. This makes any self-confident anger against bin Laden & Co completely unjustified. Isn't this just playing into the hands of the Ron Paul types, or even worst, of Noam Chomsky?

Well, first of all, thanks for trying to answer my question. So you seem to be saying "No" due to circumstantial reasons, but also "Yes" in "borderline cases" (whatever those would be). I think "to have a right to do this or that" has to be distinguished from "being right to do this or that". The former is defined by principle, the latter by circumstances: For example, America and any other free country on principle had/has a right to overthrow the Iraqi government, because a dictator has no sovereignty anyway. This doesn't mean it was/is morally right to do so given the circumstances, since other countries are much more important to overthrow (like Iran and Saudi Arabia) to actually fight the ideology. So my question was really about having a right. You and others here give all sorts of reasons why it should not be right to do what my question asks, reasons that seem plausible to me. But my interest is more about matters of principle, of the actual self-esteem to be claimed by the governments in question. This can only be answered by whether people - on principle - actually have a right to attack the governments in question, because only this shows how those governments are actually to be evaluated. So your answers about whether it would be right or not are quite okay, but I think putting too much effort on answering that way actually evades the really interesting question whether they actually have a right. But may I take it then that your "borderline case" (whatever that may be) says "Yes, they do have a right"?

No, I am not proposing a "World Police" or a One World Government. Where did I say that? Am I hinting at that anywhere? It's important to have multiple governments, so if one of them does bad, you you can still flee to the other. But they should all be Laissez Faire Capitalist, protecting individual rights, of course. As for the rest (justified actions by governments at war), I think my last post has dealt with that.

I'm sorry for that. I did hope it would make your eyes jump to attention but not to the extend of overexitement

Don't know what you're talking about. There is a clear quote from her (I think it was her statement for OPAR) that says something like Peikoff being the only reliable representative of her philosophy...don't know the exact wording, but I was assuming this should go without saying in this forum: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Biography/Philosophers/Peikoffcom-QandA-on-Ayn-Rand-Podcast/30431

I see that such - at least seeming contradictions - cause confusion about how to interpret Rand. Not being a reader of all these her works to know the full context of her statements, I must rely on her appointed intellectual heirs to know the right interpretation. But in any case, it does not seem to me that we have a disagreement on principle here. Or that there is one between you and the ARI. It's merely a factual one. As you have agreed in one of your previous posts, you, too, think that killing of innocents is moral if there is really no alternative between the killing of innocents while stopping force that came from an aggressor and saving your life versus not killing innocents and dying from the force by the aggressor. You merely seem to think those kinds of situations don't really exist or never existed. But they actually do, namely in every war, since any war normally involves beating, i.e. breaking the will, of a commander in chief in control of his armed forces ruling over a people he is fighting for. If that commander is a die-hard lunatic that never wants to accept defeat, he either commits suicide (which actually is the breaking of will) or he is assassinated by some of his own people so that a will-broken and more sane commander that replaces him surrenders for him. Since you like to take it down to the individual level - I think that's actually very important to look at and the key to this: First of all, statements by the military officials you gave in the link don't really change the need to throw the Atom bomb, since they are largely merely concerned with or give vague statements about the fact that the war was already about to be won or that Japan was already somehow "trying" or "ready" to surrender, but not exactly about how and when. Well, had they already surrendered? No. Was the Japanese Emperor just on his way to his office to call all his generals to stop or to the podium or whatever public place to go to, in order to announce that surrender and demand the immediate cease fire of all Japanese troops everywhere? Obviously not. Because that's trying to surrender! And it happened only after those bombs. It may be true that Japan was already loosing and that America would have won soon anyway. And that some kind of blockade could gradually have brought the Japanese to surrender soon. The point is not just to win the war "soon", but to win it as quickly as possible with the absolute minimum of American casualties. That's best immediately and with not a single further American dying. Just one more Japanese Kamikadze bomber that kills one more American soldier because of one more hour of unnecessary fighting is one more American soldier too much! As is one more Japanese Kamikadze bomber that still has one more ounce of hope because there is one more chance that maybe American might isn't that overwhelming, so there might still be reason for something to fight for, causing him to kill one more American! If all you really care about as a government is saving American lives, you really do have to make this purely rational calculation. So to get back to the individual level: Every single American on a plane, or on a ship awaiting his next mission or its cancellation, or in the middle of a battle that could go on for another 30 Minutes that could mean his death or be ended the next moment with his life saved because of enemy surrender faces these very two alternatives. If survival is his interest then the only thing that must be desirable to him rationally is that the whole thing that makes his mission necessary, i.e. the war with the Japanese still fighting, is cancelled immediately so he doesn't have to risk dying. He cannot care about how many million Japanese have to die right now to make this happen. It's his life against theirs. He must want this war to stop, to be over, to end now. This is what every single American in battle faces. And he has delegated the power to make decisions with only this his interest at heart to his government. The government is just an agent acting on his behalf. And the government has the responsibility of fulfilling this task for each and every one of the American citizens. Every single American for which it has neglected this duty is an act of treason. So you could have a situation with a single American live saved and a million Japanese dying. That doesn't matter in the eyes of the government, because it doesn't matter in the eyes of the single American who wants to survive. That single American still has to consider his own life more valuable than those of that million Japanese. Since the American government is merely a representative of that single American, it has the right - in the name of that single American - to accept the killing of the million Japanese to save the one American whom it is actually responsible for - and not the other way round. That's as serious as it can get. And brutal as this is, that's why war better not be started! This kind of thinking - this kind of government responsibility - clearly just doesn't allow for any kind of guessing games about how the war might be won differently, as long as only a single American live is put as risk. And by the way, it's not my military forces.

You say that he would have a moral justification to acting independently if all else fails. Or what form of "acting independently" other than actually retaliating by force do you mean here? And the reasons you give as to why he shouldn't do it are purely circumstantial - and plausible by the way - but they in no way reduce the guilt of his enemy. So how does this not mean that you think his enemy deserves to be killed? If not by the victim himself, then through the legal way by trial and the death penalty, but I cannot see how you are not implying here that he does deserve to be killed. A person deserving to be killed and another person being right in doing the killing are two different things. So I'm sorry if I put words in your mouth that you didn't mean to say, but I couldn't see how to draw any other conclusion. So in order to - hopefully - remove the last room for confusion, I could restate my question and ask whether government members of the kind in question should be put on trial and be convicted to death? And I consider it equivalent to my last version of the question, because one way or the other, the answer tells you what is really interesting in this world, namely: What kind of righteousness or self-esteem can Western governments today claim for themselves? What status are they supposed to be given on the political world stage? Are they something to look up to and admire in certain ways or not? Do we live in a world in which there are bad people but at least also some better people in key positions of power, or is there no dominant force to take pride and comfort in having around you? If they're all just dressed up savages anyway, then well, what words of complaint can you really utter to some happy-go-green hippie lying in the street, smoking pot, proudly dressed down in rags, and above all claiming that he himself already represents the best kind of dominant cultural phenomenon there is in the world, while sneering at how stupid you are admiring some allegedly higher milieu? Nothing! Fooling around then becomes "the new credibility", dressing like rubbish "the new fashion of honesty and down-to-earthness", because the bottom line is: Being careless but innocent is still superior to caring but evil, as void and unlivable the first may be, or isn't it? But as I now meanwhile have come to understand, the whole issue to you seems to bear no resemblance to reality whatsoever anyway: Well, I didn't even expect there to be any disagreement on the status of dealings between Western governments and those rogue states. I thought it is generally accepted knowledge here, that there is such a thing as "Western hypocrisy" nowadays in this matter. So I didn't even see myself as putting forward anything to be even considered as hypothetical, but merely a description of current circumstances. What I want to know is whether the existing Western hyprocrisy must be evaluated as something that constitutes an initiation of force by the state equivalent to murder. So what I interpreted as a "Yes" in your answer to me had to mean a claim about those individuals, too. So me not even being clear on the answer to my question myself, I don't know what it is supposed to "reveal" of my own thinking. Rather, what is revealed to me about your thinking is that in your eyes there even seems to be no such thing as a Western hypocrisy in our time. See, that's my strategy: I agree, there seems to be a "No"-vote on their part. And the very fact that it seems to be possible to people with such a highly organized, utterly rational and largely consistent way of thinking to maintain a "No" on this question in an ever-more "Yes"-leaning world, gives me great hope that I'm wrong with my fears. If only this were true, that would be wonderful. It would be a great relief to comprehend the "No". But it seems you can't really get them to utter the "No" directly and tell you why, since numerous Q&As from their talks haven't produced any answer, mostly because no one even faces them with the question. Hence the best thing to do is to get to places like these, which I expect to be crammed with their disciples, people who study Objectivism at University, meet and talk to the relevant people, i.e. their Objectivist teachers and professors who must have taught them exactly how you arrive at a "No" in this matter. So I was expecting to be bombarded by their arguments here - at the slightest suggestion of, let's say, "Western liability to persecution" - counting on their eagerness to defend and exercise what they learned on Campus, and - hopefully - with rationally convincing arguments that I can then verify independently myself. So it's rather the other way round: Maybe I haven't really understood Objectivism or how to apply it, but that's why this is important.

Got other information the historical facts, but one way or the other "trying to surrender" isn't immediate unconditional surrender. It still would have meant US-soldier's would have had to die unnecessarily in further fighting until Japan had finished its period of socalled "trying to surrender". Just one single more US-Soldier that had died unnecessarily in the war due to further delay of Japan's armistice would have been an act of treason on the part of the US government. Hence Trueman, Churchill and the like are moral heroes for having done what they did. Okay, you are giving a lot of circumstantial reasons for saying "No" here. But taking all these circumstantial reasons away, your answer on principle actually seems to be "Yes". So maybe I should have asked the other way round, i.e. whether those government members deserve to be killed. On that question your answer is clearly "Yes" then. That's interesting. Because the following is what you will have to think with all anger and hate, then, everytime you see not only Obama or Bush, but especially also Bill Clinton, David Cameron, late Margareth Thatcher, Angela Merkel and many others while they're giving a talk on television: "This is a guy (or a woman) that really deserves to be killed - just like Adolf Hitler or Stalin, they all aren't any better than that." Well, I seriously doubt that this is how mainstream Objectivist spokesmen would see this, but I am still to hear a clear and definate answer on this question by them, and above all, an explanation if the answer is "No.". And given that you obviously don't agree with the mainstream Objectivist spokesmen on standard answers about WW2 or on how should be dealt with Islamic Terrorism, I cannot rely on you representing the Objectivist position. But thanks, anyway, for your answer. As for the others, I'd like to see someone who sees himself closer to the intellectual leaders of Objectivism express his opinion on the question: "Given that a lot of Western government members (whether that be current or ex Presidents or whoever) supported and were involved in, e.g., selling weapons to Saudi Arabia (which according to the State Department together with Iran is the world's number one supporter of Islamic terrorism worldwide) or otherwise in supporting such regimes: Do these government members actually deserve to be killed, Yes or No (and why not if "No")?"