Steve D'Ippolito

There he goes again.

The problem is that of late, courts are denying these groups standing to sue. Apparently having your taxes used to support religion is no longer enough reason to be able to sue.

Actually the last line of his quote asserts that existence is a genus. The implication is that it cannot be a species of some higher-order genus, which is what you have been saying all along. In other words, his quote undermines his argument. In any sort of hierarchy, be it conceptual or not, there is an uppermost element, with other elements below it branching out, like an upside down tree. (That uppermost element is sometimes called the "root" of the tree even though it's drawn at the top, because the hierarchy looks like an upside-down tree.) Talking about genus and species is simply a specific way (specific to the hierarchy of concepts) of stating that every element in the tree has an element immediately higher than it. Which isn't actually true; unless the tree is of infinite extent there will be at least one exception, the root or topmost element. So what? Is this really a problem? I don't think so. Ayn Rand realized that "existence" is a special case because it is at the top of the tree, that's why existence is an axiomatic concept; you can't define it as being a species of some higher genus. She was far more interested in making the point about every single OTHER concept that they were a species of a genus, and were oftentimes (but not always) a genus to some other concepts' species.

Hey, where's the spoiler code? Anyhow... SPOILERS below. I could certainly think of a number of things to improve. Some of them could even be rectified by some clever scriptwriting in the second part. There were a couple of places where characterization was done glaringly and flatly wrong. Dagny trying to bribe d'Anconia with sex was the worst of these. Though I think they had d'Anconia react properly to the offer. (In other words, if the "real" Dagny had done this, d'Anconia would have behaved exactly as shown.) A lot of the issues come down to the fact that a lot of things said in the book just can't be done the same way in a visual medium. A lot of AS the book is looking into the thoughts of the characters, and that's difficult (at best) to do in a visual medium. This is why, in large part I was willing to forgive strikers (Akston and d'Anconia) looking slovenly in the movie when they are not portrayed as such in the book. But I felt emotional impacts from the film, and many people found the movie followable even not having read the book, so I consider claims that the movie is confusing without the book to be overwrought. Clearly a lot was left unsaid in the movie, and so we, having read the book, miss the absence of those things--but that doesn't make the movie, standing by itself, incoherent necessarily.. Others, far more importantly, wanted to read the book due to what they saw in the movie, and that is the biggest good that can come out of it. To sum up: Yeah, a lot could be improved. Complete piece of trash? Hardly!

The comments on the original post http://blog.dianahsi...l#disqus_thread are particularly interesting given who is supporting Santorum's position and how. (The Whittaker Chambers "gas chamber" line gets invoked.)

He can rail against it--but advising people to do it (as Boris did) cannot be construed as advising people to break the law. (Please remember the context of my comment.)

He asked about legal means. Tax avoidance is not illegal; you are allowed to change your (legal) behavior to reduce your taxes. Tax evasion, on the other hand, defined basically as breaking the law to avoid paying taxes you are legally required to pay, is illegal.

There is a difference between being "pro abortion" (i.e., pro keeping it legal) and forcing people to have abortions. So comparing with Red China--or even bringing up the issue of forced abortion, as if Boydstun is somehow advocating it or voting for those who do, is just ridiculous.

Although I have a really bad attitude towards any of the four Republicans still in the race, three of them would get my vote over Obama. Just barely. The exception is Santorum--Obama would get my vote over Santorum, again just barely. He is the one candidate who seems to regard the bible-thumper social issues as more important than the economy. When he lists his priorities, he talks about faith, family, values. Yeah, he will spew good rhetoric about the size of government and so forth when specifically asked, but clearly those social issues are what _really_ motivate him. And with the economy in the toilet right right now, focusing on this other crap that does NOT address a threat to the US is just fricking nuts. The other candidates might only be pandering to the religious right; Santorum is definitely enthusiastic about the crap they want to focus on. Mind you Gingrich and Romney would probably be worthless on the economy but at least they would pay more attention to it than they would on abortion/gay marriage/don't ask don't tell. Paul is the only one who comes close to satisfactory on the economy but he more than makes up for it with a dreadful foreign policy and a states-rights agenda on the social issues.

When I read "Marist" as in "Marist poll" I always do a doubletake until I realize the X is missing and it's not "Marxist." Though from what you are telling us it's not far from the truth anyway. (To be sure I think Andrew Bernstein teaches at Marist college.) As long as I am hijacking this thread with wordplay, here's a joke that went the rounds at the State Department at the time of the Falklands War. (Oh, boy I am dating myself...) What do you call an Argentinian Communist? A Gaucho Marxist.

When talking about primacy, it's generally an issue of whether consciousness is part of reality (and therefore subject to natural laws) or whether our consciousnesses somehow create reality. That last has always sounded just absolutely silly to me, yet so many people actually believe it.

Not too shabby! I don't think anyone could take too much exception to it except maybe the second sentence, but that sentence happens to be a correct statement so they can lump it.

Fair enough... Pearl Harbor was the immediate cause of WWII but if the Japanese hadn't done that, something else would have happened eventually. Maybe not something as clear cut and nakedly aggressive, but they would eventually have trod on our toes in some other way that even blockheaded appeaser pacifists couldn't ignore because of the nature of their regime. Or we would have had to come to the defense of some place a lot more important to us than China. Perhaps the Japanese wanted to conquer a lot more territory than they had at the time, before trying to take us on, but they were being squeezed by the sanctions. Well, good. That would mean that ultimately, rather than "causing" the war, they helped make it shorter when it did happen because Japan had to attack us while they were in a weaker state than they would have liked. Japan was already the aggressor in the region, but since they just hadn't directly attacked us yet, the most response we could summon the will to make was those sanctions. It is certainly NOT the case that accomodation would have totally averted war. (Well, I suppose we could have just surrendered without even being attacked, but that would have been far worse than the war! Not that that statement would make any impression on the pacifists.) A lot of people will try to characterize your stance as "the Pacific wasn't big enough for the two of them, so of course they had to fight some day." Don't let them get away with it; it's an attempt to neutralize the moral distinction between the two powers. A civil society "isn't big enough" for me and a mass murderer either, that doesn't make me a bully who needs to be the one removed from society, much less as evil as the mass murderer. Ok, Nicky now give the gun to the nice man in the uniform sitting behind the funny steering wheel.

In other words what we did to Japan corresponded to "trade sanctions" today. And therefore IMHO we did not commit an act of war on Japan and therefore there is no basis for a claim that we were the aggressor. But of course that conclusion rests on my answer to the question being asked in this thread, so if you fall on the other side of the question, logically you'd disagree with me. Anyhow, the real topic was to ask whether sanctions were an act of war... I wanted to point out the question applied to past controversies, and I think I've done that. So with that, I'll hand the pistol to the pilot and the hijacking ends.

Rogue. Rouge is red powder.

The sentence about self sacrifice could probably be completely removed. I don't think the rest of the paragraph would fall apart if you just struck it out and left the rest. Or you could say something like this in place of the turdesque sentence: "The leader pays a high price, oftentimes getting no credit for his accomplishment and no recognition of the price he pays. But he recognizes the great value of those accomplishments and is willing to pay that price."

I am reminded of the fact that many people will try to argue that the US was the aggressor against Japan in WWII on account of the economic sanctions we put on them (in response to their depradations elsewhere in Asia). To the best of my knowledge this was not an outright blockade. So the answer to this question has bearing on those allegations (by Chomskyite and Rothbardian (Ron Paul) types who look for excuses to blame the US for absolutely everything--though to my knowledge they've not tried to blame the US for the collapse of the Roman empire, yet) as well.

I'd be interested... somewhat... to know how recent Branden's comments are, and whether he'd still stand by them if they are old ones. Of course he's not really an Objectivist any more so depending on the timing, the answer might not be germane. Also, just because Leonard Peikoff says something, that doesn't make it Objectivism. The only person whose pronouncements can plausibly be taken as authoritative would be Ayn Rand, and even there, there is a Garbage In, Garbage Out effect at work. Objectivism is among many other things a method to be applied in order to answer specific questions, but you have to have proper inputs (knowledge) to base your conclusions on. Back in AR's day homosexuality was considered, by the "experts" to be a mental illness and no doubt she was taking that erroneous information into account when she spoke. It is not a principle of Objectivism that homosexuality is immoral even if some Objectivists might conclude as much (and never mind the occasional individual who calls himself an Objectivist and rationalizes in a way to confirm his prejudices). You seem to be bending over backwards to conclude Objectivists don't want you around; that's why some people have asked if you are trolling.

If one is not an Objectivist, the two questions mean very different things. The first asks him when he himself came to the conclusion that homosexuality is immoral, the second asks when he came to the conclusion that Objectivism teaches that it is immoral. (And even if one is not an Objectivist, the two questions don't mean the same thing, though they will have the same answer.)

You have not demonstrated that she advocated government ownership of anything. Thus you haven't shown that she herself is not a capitalist by this definition of capitalism.

Come on, you can do better than this. The 1971 S doubled die is worth ten times as much (albeit existing only as a proof), as is the 1972 doubled die--700 bucks vs. 70. And the 1955 doubled die in high grade breaks five figures.

On the whole, "the public" doesn't know we exist.

Well crap. I didn't notice it was В not Б. Sorry about that, Вениамин. [interesting bit of history there--when the Romans picked up the concept of an alphabet, and modified the Greek alphabet to suit themselves, Β or Β was a "b" sound and we still call it "beta"; by the time St. Cyril and Methodius brought writing to the Slavs, the sound represented by Β in Greek had changed to "v" and the Greeks call the letter "vetta" now--that is why the symbol В in Cyrillic stands for a "v" sound not a "b." The spoken Greek language had changed its phonology (a not uncommon phenomenon; a different instance of this is one reason our spelling is so screwy in English). Clearly somewhere along the line, I'd guess in Greece after the Old Testament was translated into Greek (The "Septuagint"), but before Cyril's time "Beniamin" became "Veniamin" and he spelled it with В not Б--Cyrill had to invent the latter letter to render the "b" sound in Slavic since the sound no longer existed in Greek. (He invented a lot of new letters, actually; the old Slavic tongues had a lot of sounds that didn't appear in Greek.) If so that makes it possible to more precisely date when the B->V shift occurred in Greek--it was after 300 BCE but still before 900 CE.]

Yes, now that you mention it, I've heard that too. And the fact that the preachers who spend the most time screaming about homosexuality (*cough* Ted Haggard *cough*) seem to be the ones who get caught with their pants down (so to speak) the most often just adds more anecdotal "evidence" to that theory.

I first started hearing the words "homophobe" and "homophobia" in the early 80s (which, I believe, is when they were invented), and they never made much sense. They _should_ have meant "people who fear homosexuals/homosexuality" but clearly they were used to mean people "who hate homosexuals to the point of going around 'fag bashing'" As if the word they really wanted was 'mis-homoist' or something like that. Of course the word makes some sense if one believes in the pop psychology trope that people who are hostile towards someone invariably are so out of hidden fear, and I am fairly confident that those who coined the word did believe this. Though it's possible the confusion was deliberate, to score propaganda points by belittling the opponents (calling them cowards, implicitly). Besides "homophobe" rolls off the tongue more easily than "mishomoist."