Craig24

The more I read your posts on this subject, your main issue looks to be that you're criticizing Rand for not clearing up how -entities- have meaning. You could call identity a universal, or the identity of something is a universal, but this doesn't follow how people mean an -entity- when they say universal. I seriously doubt that people here would deny that there are metaphysical givens, and some entities share some intrinsic traits, and that such givens are how we create an epistemic "mental entity" (which is a term Rand used). See your other thread for more thoughts...

About 5 years ago, Steven Farron wrote an essay in Liberty titled Defending Capitalism against Ayn Rand.  Contemplate this for a moment.  He thinks Ayn Rand, in some sense, was anti-capitalist even though she explicitly promoted and defended capitalism.  In the essay he writes:
“She thought that the heroes she created were exemplars of pure, uncorrupted capitalism.  In fact, the heroes she created in Atlas Shrugged came from her sense of life, which was not only un-capitalist but anti-capitalist.”
That’s a head scratcher.  He continues:
“In Atlas Shrugged, Rand created heroes who embodied her sense of life and described how such heroes would fulfill their heroic natures if they engaged in economic activities.  She thought that the sum of their economic activities and interactions provides a template of what laissez-faire capitalism would look like.  She was wrong.  When the heroes who embody her sense of life engage in economic activities, they function like Communist administrators, not capitalist businessmen.”
Her heroes function like Communist administrators in what way?  Farron continues:
“To paraphrase Rand, “Grandeur is the one word that names” the sense of life of Communist economies.  They had no concern with anything “penny ante.”  … The heroes of Atlas Shrugged are heroic because, like Communist bureaucrats, they produce or maintain impressive products, not mean little ones.  It would be unimaginable for a Rand hero to be a manufacturer of “penny ante” products, such as disposable baby diapers, menstrual tampons, or dependable contraceptives.  But these distinctively 20th-century inventions improved the quality of life immeasurably by freeing people from preoccupation with brute, animal existence.”
Farron is saying that what makes you anti-capitalist is a grandiose preoccupation with the heroic struggle to create impressive products, not mean little ones.  When Galt invents his motor he is being anti-capitalist because his motor is so much more impressive than a tampon.  Wrap your head around that one. 
Capitalism is the system of individual rights.  The essence of capitalism is the banning of coercion in human relationships.  Under capitalism you deal with others by persuasion and trade, not force and fraud.  Now what part of inventing an impressive motor instead of a tampon consists of promoting or using force?  Galt, Hank Rearden, Francisco D’anconia, Ellis Wyatt and Dagny Taggart do not promote or use force by being grandiose or impressively productive and Farron has to know that.  So what the **** is he really trying to do in this essay?  

About 5 years ago, Steven Farron wrote an essay in Liberty titled Defending Capitalism against Ayn Rand.  Contemplate this for a moment.  He thinks Ayn Rand, in some sense, was anti-capitalist even though she explicitly promoted and defended capitalism.  In the essay he writes:
“She thought that the heroes she created were exemplars of pure, uncorrupted capitalism.  In fact, the heroes she created in Atlas Shrugged came from her sense of life, which was not only un-capitalist but anti-capitalist.”
That’s a head scratcher.  He continues:
“In Atlas Shrugged, Rand created heroes who embodied her sense of life and described how such heroes would fulfill their heroic natures if they engaged in economic activities.  She thought that the sum of their economic activities and interactions provides a template of what laissez-faire capitalism would look like.  She was wrong.  When the heroes who embody her sense of life engage in economic activities, they function like Communist administrators, not capitalist businessmen.”
Her heroes function like Communist administrators in what way?  Farron continues:
“To paraphrase Rand, “Grandeur is the one word that names” the sense of life of Communist economies.  They had no concern with anything “penny ante.”  … The heroes of Atlas Shrugged are heroic because, like Communist bureaucrats, they produce or maintain impressive products, not mean little ones.  It would be unimaginable for a Rand hero to be a manufacturer of “penny ante” products, such as disposable baby diapers, menstrual tampons, or dependable contraceptives.  But these distinctively 20th-century inventions improved the quality of life immeasurably by freeing people from preoccupation with brute, animal existence.”
Farron is saying that what makes you anti-capitalist is a grandiose preoccupation with the heroic struggle to create impressive products, not mean little ones.  When Galt invents his motor he is being anti-capitalist because his motor is so much more impressive than a tampon.  Wrap your head around that one. 
Capitalism is the system of individual rights.  The essence of capitalism is the banning of coercion in human relationships.  Under capitalism you deal with others by persuasion and trade, not force and fraud.  Now what part of inventing an impressive motor instead of a tampon consists of promoting or using force?  Galt, Hank Rearden, Francisco D’anconia, Ellis Wyatt and Dagny Taggart do not promote or use force by being grandiose or impressively productive and Farron has to know that.  So what the **** is he really trying to do in this essay?  

Objectivist Ed Powell has written a paper against the open borders immigration position of other Objectivists (Binswanger, Tracinski, Biddle, Bernstein, Duke).
This raises the question: Does a foreigner have a right to cross an international border?  Powell says no.  Powell says the burden of proof that any applicant for entry is not a threat to the freedom or security of the country lies with the applicant.  
The paper is well written, the position well argued.  For reference: Binswanger's essay and Biddle's essay

Why would I do that?  You are the one asserting that Objectivists don't understand the views of mystics/subjectivists.  You need to prove it.  

Objectivist Ed Powell has written a paper against the open borders immigration position of other Objectivists (Binswanger, Tracinski, Biddle, Bernstein, Duke).
This raises the question: Does a foreigner have a right to cross an international border?  Powell says no.  Powell says the burden of proof that any applicant for entry is not a threat to the freedom or security of the country lies with the applicant.  
The paper is well written, the position well argued.  For reference: Binswanger's essay and Biddle's essay

You have presented no argument that they are. I can't think of any either. So I guess it's settled, they're not living for the sake of the Walton family.
Also, your question contains a blatant lie. $9/hour (about the average minimum wage in the US) is a lot more than is required for survival. There are billions of people in the world who work much harder and in much worse conditions, and survive on less than 10% of what Walmart employees get paid.
On a global scale, Walmart employees are part of the economic elite: they live in a level of comfort and luxury that is not available to most people in the world (precisely thanks to the fact that in the US, which is one of the more capitalist countries in the world, the Waltons were able to build a store chain that supports the kind of employment conditions most people can only dream of, for 1.4 million people).

If you want a value judgement, the people to ask would be women (since they wouldn't get the physical reaction the first photo is intended to cause in men).
And even then, it's an unfair comparison. The second woman doesn't have the team of stylists and professional photographers the Japanese pop star in the first image has.
[just as a note: I know a little bit about the girl in the picture. Her name is Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and she works hard to create a very interesting image for herself. I even like some of her songs (check out Fashion Monster on youtube, that's probably her best video). But that has nothing to do with the picture. The picture shows a model, made up and photographed by professionals...just by looking at it, the safer assumption would be that the picture has almost nothing to do with the person in it, she might as well be an inanimate object someone else dressed up to look a certain way. Point is, there aren't many objective value judgements you can make about the person in the picture, just by looking at it. ]

Psychology used as a common noun usually refers to the totality of our thoughts. The things that happen in our (according to Oism individual) consciousnesses. 
So, when I read that something is part of "human psychology" (singular, no less, not "human psychologies"), the only way that makes sense to me is by assuming some kind of collective consciousness.
There would be no other way for 7 billiion individuals to have the same set of thoughts, except if they share a consciousness.
We don't share a psychology. We share a biology, and we develop our own psychologies. Some, more rational than others. And we certainly choose our own values, we don't have any values that came with the frame. So attributing the irrational valuing of scarcity that some humans have, and marketers like to take advantage of, to human nature, is absurd. It's not human nature to be irrational. You choose it.

I was going to vote for Trump to keep Hillary out but that was months ago.  I can't do that now.  I know now what Nicky has known all along.  He's a disaster in the making if he's elected.  Vote for Johnson if Hillary is unacceptable to you or don't vote.  

Conservative writer David French explains how the Alt Right abuses the Conservative Never Trumpers:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441319/donald-trump-alt-right-internet-abuse-never-trump-movement
 

The context that is missing is the only context that actually matters when making choices that concern other people: WHO THE PEOPLE ARE.
And that's the context that is deliberately being abstracted away, for one and only one purpose: to create a test that trips up a moral code that relies on the judging of people.

If Tracinski had started his article with something more like this, it still ties in well with the points he made that were referenced in the OP.
 
This would be another good point for Robert to have raised.
 
More broadly, the trolley problem is often submitted to students seeking to firm up their precariously semi-rational state. How many of the instructors positing this today are seeking the sanction of their students to provide themselves with a source of certainty? From Galt's Speech, pg. 960:
"When you listen to a mystic's harangue on the impotence of the human mind and begin to doubt your consciousness, not his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is the only source of certainty he has.
Are the instructors laying the groundwork for a rational basis in ethics, stressing that most moral problems do not require a sacrifice of this kind? Or do they use it to undermine the efficacy of the human mind, stressing that the "right" consists of picking the least amount of victims based on quantity per at best a metaphysically based trolley run amuck, or perhaps allowing the turning of moral culpability to the designers of a failed braking system, or perhaps a yardman who neglected to set the brakes?
 

In the future I might write a detailed analysis of memetic warfare. But for now I hope you'll Google search some anti-Establishment and Wall Street memes. You'll notice how clever these Alt-Righters are in ironically combining their message with popular cultural symbols and movements. I won't pollute this board with their propaganda, but here is one example of how they used the BLM's popularity to inject their views into the conversation.

Tracinski states,
This is not what Ayn Rand says in her essay "The Ethics of Emergencies".
The essay begins with her asking us to consider the implications of someone who begins their approach to the subject of ethics with lifeboat scenarios - which she regards as a disintegrated, malevolent, and basically altruistic approach to the subject, that cannot ultimately yield a rational system of ethics.
She did not say that lifeboat scenarios are "irrelevant", that they are the 0.01 of cases that morality is "not intended for", she says exactly the opposite:
And she absolutely did not say that moral principles are "intended for the 99.9% of existence":
She does not say to act in accordance with your hierarchy of values 99.9% of the time, she says always. Sacrificing a greater value to a lesser one is not okay 0.01% of the time, it's never okay. She did not say that moral principles apply to 99.9% of one's choices - she says they apply to all choices.
She then goes to take those principles of ethics that apply in the 99.9% of existence in which one is not in an emergency, and proceeds to apply those very same principles to emergency situations:
As we can see in this example, the virtue of integrity, which applies in the 99.9% of existence in which one is not in an emergency, also prescribes what one ought to do in the 0.01% of life in which one is in an emergency, too.
I started a separate thread answering what one ought to do in the trolley problem here:
 

The Humanitarian with the Trolley
Robert Tracinski makes public, sometimes, publications that he sends out to former subscribers, of which I am one.
This one struck me because it identifies insights, that once stated, seem obvious. Even with Rand's Ethics of Emergencies, and having seen variations on the Trolley Car Problem, the observations made are like ones I'd like to be able to make more often in life.
He couches the dilemma early as:
This is an old philosophical conundrum about a runaway streetcar, where you have to decide whether to pull a switch that will divert the trolley onto Track B–where it will kill a single person–thereby diverting it from Track A, where it would kill a whole crowd full of school kids who all look exactly like Oliver Twist from that old movie.
We've seen variations here about stealing water in the desert to live.
I've held the rather unsympathetic view that lifeboat scenarios do not merit much consideration. In this short piece, a predecessor to shed insight where he is intending to make a more public version, he states:
Ayn Rand’s memorable rejoinder was in “The Ethics of Emergencies,” where she dismissed such “lifeboat” scenarios as irrelevant to morality. Moral principles are formed from and intended for the 99.9% of existence that happens when you are not in a life-and-death emergency. So the question is: why are philosophers so fascinated with those extremely rare scenarios?
He directly address this in the next paragraph, but what really stood out was the assessment of what such an approach does in the culture:
The cost of this is that in making philosophy seem more complex and difficult, these scenarios also make ethics seem irrelevant to all of our ordinary decisions. It’s just there for lifeboats and runaway trolleys, should such an emergency arise in the course of your everyday life.
Bold, my emphasis added. A similar thought exists in political assessments were the contrast is sometimes drawn between the publicly stated 'unintended consequences' of a policy are re-couched as the 'intended consequences' of later analytical pieces of the same policies. He goes on:
Yet there’s a deeper and much creepier attraction. Notice that all of these emergency situations have one thing in common: they require sacrifice. Somebody has to die if others are going to live. They all carry the implicit premise that moral problems require sacrifice, and that the main purpose of morality is to tell us who should be sacrificed to whom.
Granted, in the water in the desert scenario, what is laid on the sacrificial alter is not life, per se, but of when property rights can be sacrificed, by whom, and for what.
He sums these two up with the following:
So the purpose of starting with the trollies and lifeboats is to instill in us the idea that morality is synonymous with altruism, that it is synonymous with a morality of sacrifice.
Granted, these are not the explicitly stated premises of altruism, but when, other than a rare moment or two, does altruism state its premises explicitly? Altruism thrives by the unstated, the unnamed, the unidentified, — camouflaged to avoid detection and operate behind the scenes. Oh my. Am I touting conspiracy theory? I can only tout this tidbit that comes to mind from Galt's Speech:
"It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners—a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value[.]
The last part that I'd like to share with you here from Robert's article is:
Which is monstrous when you think about it. Under the guise of an exercise in moral clarity, the Trolley Problem is trying to convince us that otherwise decent men should be prepared to kill innocent people for the greater good.
What other package dealings lie at the heart of other pseudo-ethical dilemmas?
 
postscript: The Trolley Problem

In Objectivism, ethics deals with what's good or bad, and metaphysics deals with what is. Objectivism does not describe reality and natural laws and phenomenons as good or bad, it only describes human choices as good or bad.
With that out of the way, within the context of Ethics, Objectivism would consider as bad those deaths which are chosen for irrational reasons, it would consider good those deaths which are chosen for rational reasons, and it would consider amoral (neither good nor bad) those deaths which are inevitable.
I'll give some examples for each category:
1. murder, or death that is self inflicted through carelessness, passivity, evasion, or other forms of irrationality (murder is considered bad because violating the rights of a fellow member of a civilized society is considered irrational).
2. death that is chosen for the purpose of avoiding unbearable pain due to terminal illness (euthanasia), or a justified deliberate killing (for instance, Hitler's killing)
3. death due to incurable disease or natural disaster
The reason why I gave this answer rather than answer your exact question is because the above is the only rational definition of good and bad that I'm familiar with (I'm also aware of several arbitrary, religious definitions of good or bad, that go along the lines of "the will of God is good, the opposite is bad"...but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that's not the kind of definition you're operating under).
If you wish me to answer your question in the context of metaphysics, without involving religion, I'd be happy too...as soon as you define the terms good and bad in that context.

I was going to vote for Trump to keep Hillary out but that was months ago.  I can't do that now.  I know now what Nicky has known all along.  He's a disaster in the making if he's elected.  Vote for Johnson if Hillary is unacceptable to you or don't vote.  

I was going to vote for Trump to keep Hillary out but that was months ago.  I can't do that now.  I know now what Nicky has known all along.  He's a disaster in the making if he's elected.  Vote for Johnson if Hillary is unacceptable to you or don't vote.  

I was going to vote for Trump to keep Hillary out but that was months ago.  I can't do that now.  I know now what Nicky has known all along.  He's a disaster in the making if he's elected.  Vote for Johnson if Hillary is unacceptable to you or don't vote.  

By the way, if you believe that men have a magical soul, that exists on a different plane and transcends our material selves, how does that compute with your previously stated superstitions about how "genes determine human thinking"?
Which is more powerful? The magical soul or the magical genes?

Seriously, stop repeating this without at least citing -some- scientist who claims this. I can't even evaluate if what you say is true, and it's a pretty major claim. As to innate -knowledge-, there aren't many people who claim this. Objectivism is closest to Constructivism in terms of foundation, a credible and relatively mainstream psychological theory in contrast to Nativism which is also mainstream but proposes mostly innate capacities or cognitive structure.
Don't just state facts but refuse to back them up when asked. The only research I know about leaning towards ingroup preferences, part of a theory proposed by Jonathan Haidt. One, it isn't a theory about genetic predisposition. Two, it's a lot more than a "small sliver" who have weak ingroup preferences.
Forget Objectivism, your claim about "genetically hardwired' is unsupported. Besides, the framework you speak of is based on the philosophical premise that reason is man's means of survival. Whether people are inherently collectivist is another question.
What do -you- mean by "thinking in terms of groups"?

Those would be AnCaps. I agree, this wouldn't work. I mean, Rand as an example was pretty pro-military, and not as "libertopia" private mercenaries. Doesn't mean conscription, e.g. a draft, is required for a military. I'm not sure I'd call your idea here a nation-tribe really. Conscription, maybe. Part of my thinking here is that co-operation is a better term here, albeit with what I see as the ineffectiveness of a draft. Good soldiers desire to fight, no? And bad soldiers wouldn't care.

This is not the case.  150 years ago oil had no use, and was regarded as a nuisance when struck while digging a well for water.  Now it is a major source of energy.  The same goes for countless other resources that had no known uses in the past and are now valuable.  The same will also be true for unknown "resources" in the future.
RESOURCES ARE NOT LIMITED.  ECONOMICS IS NOT A ZERO SUM GAME.  To believe so it to fundamentally not understand economic history.
And, are you under the impression that the Germans, Swiss, French, Czech, Hungarians, Greeks, Slovaks, etc., all share the same "Western" values as those of the United States?
Rand saw that the values that brought forth the United States (derived from the Glorious Revolution) did not have a sound philosophical foundation, and she sought to provide one.
Your argument for a "technocratic" tribe is too vague to be credible.  What exactly does that mean?  Are you trying to make a case for "scientific" centralized planning?  We've been there and done that.  It didn't work.

That's weird. You would think that if a species is "genetically hardwired" to think a certain way, everyone would think the same way. We're genetically hardwired to walk on two legs, for instance...so we do. I'm yet to see a comparatively tiny group of political intellectuals walk around on all fours and scour the steppes like a zebra.
So what happened to these intellectuals? There must be quite a difference between their genes and everyone else's. Have you identified which genes are different yet, Herr Doktor?