Steve D'Ippolito

Now who is the dogmatist?

Well I just got a cloud flare message saying the site was unavailable, trying to click onto this page! Are you sure CloudFlare is disabled? (Or did you reenable it?)

I knew you would.

It's not so much that the US had "looser" regs but rather that many banks were pushed into, or even forced. to make bad loans. So of course when it hit the fan, "free enterprise" and the banks took the blame, rather than the US congress which passed the laws that forced the bad loans in the first place.

If I _have_ to accept one of these, frankly, I'd take the sales tax. Property taxes can force you to sell a property merely to pay the tax. Income taxes penalize productivity, and in the form of an inheritance tax, can force you to sell off property (for all the whining the left does about the loss of the family farm, they are unwilling to avoid the destruction of same by people having to do so to pay the inheritance tax on a farm). Sales tax is obnoxious qua tax (like all other taxes) but at least you cannot be assessed it unless you actually have the cash you are being taxed on as money (rather than locked up in an asset you must now sell), and it penalizes consumption, rather than thrift, or productivity.

I am noticing chat is throwing a lot more 502 errors (basically when you get one of those, it means that whatever you just typed is gone forever).

Much of my knowledge of the bible is thanks to Bart Ehrman actually, so I can heartily second Ninth Doctor's endorsement of his material. Ehrman also has six courses available from the Teaching Company (teach12.com)--there is a lot of overlap between those courses but a lot of stuff is worthwhile as well. (Actually, watching one of his courses caused my sister in law to decide she was no longer a Christian! That was a huge reaction, more than many Christians would have, but it turned out her faith rested on biblical infallibility; once the pillars were knocked out from under that premise the whole edifice came tumbling down, for her.)

My nominee for understatement of the month. I just wrote a bunch about the bible in another thread, I don't really want to get started again!

Or quite possibly both. I doubt Paul added the stuff to the gospels, mainly because Paul was active in the 50s and the gospels were written much later. I think the legend of the resurrection was an add on (of course it had to be since it could not have happened), but not by Paul. None of the gospels appears to have been written by an eyewitness. The earliest was Mark written no earlier than 70 AD, about 40 years after the crucifixion, minimum. Whoever it was that wrote it (certainly not Mark), wrote it in Greek, not Aramaic (which would be the language Jesus and his mostly illiterate followers spoke). He also ended it at Mark 16:8, two different endings (a short one and a long one) were added later. Matthew and Luke were written 15 years or so after this (an estimate to be sure). They extensively cribbed from Mark and used some other source we don't have any more for a lot of what Jesus said. None of these three claims Jesus was divine even though Matthew and Luke claim he was the literal Son of God. (The phrase "Son of God" as used elsewhere is not to be taken literally, after all Moses was named as the Son of God, as was the entire nation of Israel, in what we now call the Old Testament, which back then was the only testament.) John came out even later, All were written in Greek, originally, and it's clear in some cases the author didn't know the geography of Judea at all so was nowhere near it. It is true, absolutely true, that there are no contemporary accounts of Jesus, either from Jews or Gentile Romans or Christians, and certainly no accounts of the miracles alleged to have surrounded the crucifixion, and there are lots of contemporary sources that survive that make no note of him or the miracles (and some of the miracles would have got someone's attention IF they happened). The closest we get to a non-Christian source is Josephus but he wrote well after the alleged fact and the paragraph in question is _clearly_ a forgery added centuries later, and we can even name the forger with some confidence. Eusebius, a lying son of a bitch. (This does not mean I don't think there wasn't some guy named Jesus; I think there was--but he was of no account whatsoever until people started building a legend around him after his death. But that's a different topic.)

mustang19 Seriously. Just shut up until you've read her stuff. If you can't stomach that then ask really basic non-leading questions like "what does Ayn Rand mean by selfishness" rather than making assertions about what you think she believed. You are reminding me of creationists who barge onto atheist websites and tell people evolution is wrong because it says man is descended from chimpanzees, yet there are still chimpanzees around. Or that there ought to be a crockoduck.

There has been a fair amount of work done in Colorado Springs of late.... it takes a couple of years to do an interchange, but that is mainly because they have to work around continuing traffic flow. When they are allowed to close something outright, it's astounding how fast they can work.

A government should not "encourage" ANYTHING in the economy, much less "monopolistic competition" (whether the heck that is). The government should enforce contracts and protect about rights violations, PERIOD. "Encouraging" certain kinds of markets is out of scope.

It can say that but that doesn't make it true. It's quite a huge step to go from the act of observing something causing it to change(because the observer and his equipment interact with the system) to it necessarily being _consciousnesses_ as such that causes the change. (The conscious entity has to physically interact with the system in question, and plenty of non-conscious interaction happens too.) Consciousness as such cannot change the physical world. That's a leap that a lot of people who abuse quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle routinely make without justifying it in any way whatsoever.

I heard once that the Fountainhead and Anthem books to teachers books get stolen a lot by the students.

A classic, Ninth Doctor. (What happened to the first eight?)

definitely, defiantly so one should hope.

The latter, methinks. I remember someone thinking that the "ME" on a short autobiography I had written stood for Masters of Education and I had to restrain myself from showing any audible reaction to the inadvertent insult. Although I took an engineering masters after taking an engineering bachelors, and found the masters to be far easier (not quite a joke but much easier) than the bachelor's. It depends on the school and the faculty too.

SteveD (Chat chokes on the apostrophe, as does the quote function here apparently!).

No I am NOT saying people can lie about being Oists or even genuinely believe themselves to be such but be wrong about it. Where in the hell did you get the idea that this is what I was arguing? I am saying (for the umpteenth time now) that someone CAN be a genuine Objectivist and subsequently leave it behind. Actually I'll broaden the claim a bit: someone can understand Objectivism but not be an Objectivist, either because they left, or they never were one in the first place. You apparently are so unwilling to even entertain this possibility that you have to misinterpret everything I have said to "make sense of" it. I was referring here to the question the OP asked. HE did not indicate in asking the question that he wanted to limit its scope to people who had rational reasons for leaving. The OP never claimed correct or incorrect, rational or irrational leaving of Objectivism. As for whether it is possible for someone to leave Objectivism, having actually BEEN an Objectivist... this is the thing you cannot seem to concede might be possible. It's like Christians who say, on hearing that a preacher has become an atheist, claiming "well he must never really have been a Christian." The issue isn't whether Smith is. or has ever been, a Libertarian, but rather whether he was ever an Objectivist. But the real problem with your thinking is this, which I will quote again: You believe Objectivists are infallible. (Anyone who is fallible must not be an Objectivist?) At this point, there's no point in arguing with someone who thinks he is infallible. I guess I was more on the mark than I realized when I accused you of acting like you were the pope.

Welcome! Does this make you a born-again Objectivist? .

Indeed. It was a pleasure talking to you in chat the other night. Willkommen!

Given what the OP asked, I don't even think the reasons for abandoning Objectivism have to be rational, nor must they be correct (which is not quite the same thing--people can, operating rationally, make honest mistakes based on their context). He wants to know the percentage of Objectivists who abandon it, for whatever reason. (In point of fact the OP doesn't even stipulate that the "ex-Objectivist" have to have understood it correctly; the controversy erupted when someone claimed it was impossible for a "true" Objectivist to ever leave it.)

I'd say your eyes and hands are still working today.

I hope your eyesight and steady hands hold up over the years.

Let's go back to the beginning here: There was no indication that the reason for leaving had to be rational. Just that it had to be an O-ist who left. Your response was this: So basically, according to you, no one who ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD Objectivism could ever decide to leave. There are certainly plenty of people who don't understand it, think they did, then decide that what they believed (which isn't actually Objectivism) was bologna, so they left. This is not in dispute; we see it happen all the time. But your claim is that no one who ever understood it can possibly decide to leave. You didn't exclude the possibility that someone formerly rightly supporting Objectivism could make a wrong decision and leave. Mind you, as an Objectivist myself, I believe any decision to leave would be wrong. But the OP's question was not: How many people leave Objectivism for correct reasons? but rather, just simply "how many people leave Objectivism?" You claim that the answer must be zero, because only people who don't understand it could possibly leave it. When called on this "No True Scotsman" fallacy, you challenged people to provide an example of someone who understood O-ism but disagreed with it. An example was readily produced: George H. Smith. Your response was that he must not have understood Objectivism or he would never have left. Which is simply you begging the question. OK, TLD. Find me proof that George H. Smith had a misunderstanding of Objectivism before he denounced it. Or find me a case where he misrepresents it now--I don't mean a case where he says "I disagree with it because..." but rather a case where he asserts that Objectivism says X, where in fact Objectivism does NOT say X. That would be an indication that he does not understand what Objectivism says. Remember that the issue here is not whether George H. Smith is correct now or more to the point is Objectivist now. He isn't. It's whether he was an Objectivist in the past, and whether he ever understood it and whether he understands it today. You are holding to the position that no one who understands Objectivism can possibly oppose it, and as TheEgoist said: OK, come up with your proof that George H. Smith NEVER understood Objectivism. Find something in his writings where he makes a false claim about the tenets of Objectivism. Not a false claim about their correctness, but about their content. I don't want a refutation of George H. Smith's current position, which you (unnecessarily) provided since both of us disagree with "anarchocapitalism". I want proof from you that he misunderstands its tenets. To top off your evading of this point by trying to make this an argument over whether people who leave O-ism are right to do so, you then implied that all the people arguing with you here must not be Objectivists, because we are disagreeing with you. (emphasis mine) The only person entitled to call someone a non-Objectivist simply for disagreeing with her is dead. That's where I came up with my "who the hell died and made you pope?" line. Dante said it well: Because when presented with an example of such you simply _asserted_ without proof that that person must not have understood it. Well, I am calling you on it--at the risk of again being labeled non-Objectivist by you (like you would know). PROVE using his own words that George H. Smith never understood Objectivism.