Free Capitalist

Well I've got a question for you, OnePrimeMover/TrendyCynic: You say, Why do you feel like you have to be an Objectivist? I mean what's the big deal for you here? Clearly, unlike most people on this forum, you haven't read her fiction works and thus aren't really emotionally attached neither to AR nor to the reasons why she created her philosophy. What, then, is the big deal for you whether you are considered an Objectivist or not?

Hi Salamandra, The "footers" are called "signatures" and if you go into your profile, you can edit them.

What fiasco happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls?

I too don't think the "gleeful" comment is justified. There's a certain sense of poetic justice present, yes, but a sort of terrible justice one thinks about when imagining tons of bombs dropped onto Nazi Germany, blowing up men, women and children into bits and pieces. As for the other comments, such as Roark's destruction of the building, and Dagny's murder of the guard, I have two responses: 1) You're taking these books too literally, and clearly the main point of those scenes was not to teach that you should blow people's buildings up, or go around killing people you don't like. The main point of these scenes was to convey a certain sense of life, to help the reader experience the sense of exaltation permeating both books in yet another form. In each case, the villains get what they deserve, with interest. 2) With that said, the actual actions are nothing to be concerned with either. Dagny might have killed the guard in the end of the book, but Ragnar had been killing men like him since the beginning of the book, and even for years before the starting timeframe. Shouldn't that be an indicator that you're missing an essential component of the message AR is trying to say? In this case, the message is that the society Dagny lived in has completely converted to a brute rule by force, and she merely complied with their standards of living. In Roark's case, the destruction of Cortlandt homes is an out-and-out highly stylized depiction of his adherence to his values, and I actually find very few people who attempt to interpret it as literally as you do.

The 'problem' jaco tries to accuse Oism of is that you cannot define something like pain by abstractions. However, this 'problem' exists for everything else too - describe to your alien what green is - "photons of light, some of which are absorbed by material and others which are reflected into your eye at a wavelength X", and the same 'problem' exists that your definition will be incomplete. Jaco assumes that all of knowledge can be defined without tracing it down to concretes - that you can define pain without having a perceptual memory of pain for the other person to refer to, that you can define color without pointing to an outside object as exhibiting that color, etc. In other words, "jaco" is a full blown rationalist, to whom sensory evidence and perceptual concretes are irrelevant. But the fact is quite the opposite from his assumptions, and that nothing can be defined without concretes, NOTHING. What does the definition of "man" come down to? That thing over there (pointing). So it's not a problem in Objectivist theory of knowledge, it is a problem in jaco's pretty weak attempts to discredit things he doesn't know much about (but makes big claims for).

Zeus, if it seemed that my post made a fundamental summary of your contribution to this thread, then I'm sorry and certainly don't want to misrepresent what you were trying to say. Still, though your past escapades were not an essential component of what you were trying to say, they were a component, and that is what I was referencing. I still think it's damned funny how you two were competing about who had conquered more women, and on how many continents

Tom, as to your first question, I already responded directly to it in my previous post. Please re-read it for the answer I give. As to your second question, a strong argument could be made that all three should be under one federal government, because that avoids mercantile and petty conflicts. However, a strong argument can be made against an excessively large territory for a federal government to control, because that eliminates the idea that different countries can try and achieve the best constitution independently of one another, which they could not if the entire Earth were united under one federal government. In short, my answer is that there is no one principle that says the federal government should be size X, at all times and in all places. When creating such a government, the citizens will have to decide how to balance the need to unify and place barriers on intertestine strife, by creating a powerful central authority, with a government that is geographically larger than it ought to be, by not making the central authority too powerful and too expansive.

I'd like to add to what Burgess said by saying that, Atlas Shrugged is such a well written novel, and it explains so many things, that some people expect it to explain everything, about everything. Thank, I think, is at the root of A.A's question - "well since she explained A, B, C, why didn't she explain D?" She went into detail just enough to dramatize her theme, and the book already ended up at over a thousand pages. How many more ideas would you have liked her to expand and interweave into the rest of the story, enlarging the book's size exponentially?

Sure. What happened in Ancient Greece, the history of which the Founding Fathers knew very well, was that here was a moral and conceptually developed culture, yet with terrible intestine fighting and civil war between small balkanized associations. Aristotle said that if the Greeks ever calmed down enough to unify, they could conquer they world. Well they weren't able to do the former, and so they couldn't do the latter. What the Founding Fathers did, by establishing a strong central government, was to prevent just this sort of petty warfare. American Civil Wars was not petty warfare, it was a huge ideological divide and no political structure can withstand it. But the Greeks, despite their other virtues, commonly waged war against one another for petty reasons, and kept fighting within each other. That's all they really did, they didn't have many barbarians invading them, they were pretty much left alone by the rest of the world, but they kept fighting and killing each other. The Federalists, learning from that example, created a strong Federal Government that would prevent the individual states for waging wars and having petulant arguments with other states for petty reasons, and for destroying the union. If you look at the Federalists' examples, that is primarily what they base their arguments on, the lessons from history, rather than some kind of a-priori ivory tower philosophic deductions. They had great reasons for a strong federal government. We can argue that they made it too strong, strong enough to overpower the states to such a degree as to enforce statism, but as I said before, at least statism is better than anarchy, which is what would inevitably follow if they made the Union too weak. And it WOULD be inevitable, because even the Greeks couldn't stop themselves, so we certainly would not.

Zeus, I wasn't referring to you now as a playboy, only that you were one before. Do you disagree with that?

Folks this is a really funny thread, especially the last two pages. Two playboys playing poker is one hilarious image - "I match your Brazilian orgy and raise you two American girls". On a serious note, it is without a doubt that some students of Objectivism are prude, but I think it is because of their pre-Objectivist days, not because of anything having to do with the philosophy. Many people who get into philosophy come from the quiet, thinking type, and that type is rarely known for a propensity for large numbers of female conquests. Certainly they will bring that mindset with them to the philosophy, and Ayn Rand didn't really want to write much about this issue, pros and cons thereof. However I think it's clear, from her novels etc, that she found and encouraged a healthy integrated balance between a playboy and a shy prude.

Thank you, Diana. EDIT: Free Capitalist cannot edit his posts more than 1 hour after submitting them, so I am the one doing it by his request. Here's what he'd like to say: "I know I have been extremely harsh on TomL, but I believe it was justified because of innocent people being hurt, and the name of Objectivism being indirectly besmirched. However, after a private discussion with TomL, I have decided to erase the negative comments I wrote in his direction. I know how scathing they were, and therefore do not want to dampen the general mood of the forum any more than I have to. TomL and I seem to have come to an understanding, so, although the hostility was justified, I no longer wish my remarks to remain. For the time being I'd like to try and get everything to return back to normal. Oh, and I hope dondigitalia feels sufficiently vindicated " - Felipe

So nothing at all in relationship with dating can ever be made funny? That's ridiculous. Should there be no jokes about jobs, about sex, about one's pets? Should there never be jokes about anything one values? What kind of planet are we living on here? Where the heck does that come from? Even if we assume it is wrong to make jokes about relationships, what possible relationship can that have with insecurity? If he's saying that a joke about everything at all is wrong, then surely joking about everything is a mark of insecurity? Or what makes joking about relationships different? What possible basis can such a claim have? Let's keep going with this very condensed treasure trove of errors: So being insecure is now a crime? Certainly it's not something to seek, but most everyone is insecure in at least some fashion, so it is certainly not a terribly huge point on which to condemn someone. Furthermore, what the heck do heroes have to do with any of this? And finally, he says this: Contrary to TomL's assumption, women respond to sincerity, not repression. There was nothing but sincerity in dondigitalia's post. Moderator: Edited to remove personal attacks.

Umm, that is one enormously flawed piece of psychologizing. It's not over don's comment that I cringed, but over that pair of sentences.

This cannot be THE Atlantis, because the website says Helike was buried under the sea in 370sBC, while Plato makes reference to the mysterious Atlantis in late 400sBC, decades before.

Ok now I'm in the same boat as Felipe, and loving this thread too!

I don't think it's that simple. A very good argument could be made that though we're statist now, at least we're still one country. A less weaker central government would dissolve the country into anarchy and perrenial civil war, as happened in Ancient Greece, and what the Founders feared might happen again.

Can someone tell me how the subjects 'political candidates' and 'lying' came up in a thread about Barbara Branden? Oh yeah, well of course I can understand the subject of 'lying' arising in any thread about the Brandens, but other sub-discussions seem to be really off topic.

Looking at the burning Carthage, Scipio Aemilianus did say, that he feared the same fate would one day meet his great city as well. But yeah, the standards of ancient military warfare were extremely brutal by modern standards. But it was Dr. Peikoff who advocated converting the Middle East into a glass factory via nuclear weapons, so it's not like the ancient standards were immoral simply because of large numbers of casualites. Wars, like everything else, have to be taken in context. Just because our modern effete sensibilities make us squeamish that 1,000 of our soldiers got killed during the last 3 years, doesn't mean it really is something of concern. I mean if you think about those casualty numbers, that is an incredibly low number for any war, but we concern ourselves with it as if hundreds of thousands of American soldiers are dead. Similarly, when Dr. Peikoff announced his advocary of the 'nuclear solution', how many even of the Objectivist persuasion got seriously disturbed by his suggestion? The problem lies in our sensibilities, not in the solutions toward peace that nations may properly assume. Remember that Romans had Carthage on its knees at the end of the 2nd Punic War, and they could sack it then and there, but they left it completely intact. That shows their moderation, compared to other nations' warfare, more than anything else. Again, I don't condone the particular actions of the various consuls during the 3rd Punic War, some of them were quite facetious in how they treated Carthage. But that's not where the source of the condemnation should lie.

Argive, I have only read the first post in this thread, and based on that my reply is that I would think long and hard before accepting anything BB said, at face value.

Argive, as I've written in a private reply to you long ago, I don't think there's much ground for condemnation. I grant that some actions of individual consuls were questionable, but given the amount of blood spilled on the Roman side (by some accounts ~200,000 men in the 2nd Punic War alone), the length of the titanic conflict between the two states (~100 years), the worrysome renewed aggressive tendencies of Carthage, I don't view the sack of Carthage as very troubling. Also keep in mind that the "salting the grounds of Carthage to make it sterile" is a modern myth, as no ancient texts mention it, and salt was an exceedingly valuable commodity in the ancient world, hardly as cheap and plentiful as it is for us today. See the modern book, "Salt", which discusses how this substance fueled the ancient economies and caused the rise and fall of empires, making it the opposite of something that you could just throw around, especially over the huge area that the city of Carthage occupied. And plus, the city was resettled by the Romans a century later. Anyway, perhaps you'd like to raise for discussion individual issues that you find troublesome, and offer your own alternatives to what could be done instead (given the context of warfare in the ancient world, not modern). In other words, when you propose your own alternatives, you'll have to keep in mind Alexander's destruction of Thebes and massacre of Tyre, the old Greek customs of killing off the entire male population of cities they conquered, etc.

Pretty interesting discovery! I don't know yet how much this relates to "Atlantis" but either way we can only benefit from this discovery.

Among the Greeks, Spartans and Cretans did have governments similar to Romans in terms of their divisions of powers and checks and balances. However I don't even have to mention that the social fabric of these two countries was strongly totalitarian. Romans combined the social stability of the Spartans with the political freedom of the Athenians, neither of whom managed to figure it out on their own. As for Rational_One, he is right and the ancient (classical) world holds more wisdom and practical value than almost any era since then. During the Enlightenment era, studying the classics was the paramount and exclusive way to understanding anything about the modern world, including the concepts of rights, morality, honor, virtue, science, art, you name it. In fact our Founding Fathers, in their history classes, studied the minute details of the histories of the Greeks and the Roman Republic up until the first emperor (Augustus), in original languages. They studied nothing after that period, considering the entire history up until 16th century as irrelevant. It was said that the Founding Fathers (and much the rest of the Enlightenment culture) knew better the intimate details of classical history and civilization better than they knew the details and history of their own day. So, ArmyPatriot, if you're an American patriot as well, it might do you good to learn where America came from, and what America's Founding Fathers cared so deeply about.

I think it was more of a hypothetical question, as in, "even supposing she had any errors", rather than, "putting aside her errors". Regarding aspects of personality, those are not 'errors' per se, and different people respond to them differently.

Regarding "no historical records of Jesus' existence": From Tacitus, circa 90AD,