agrippa1

I agree, but it'll never happen as long as they are commonly used in fighting, unless, of course, we flood the airwaves with Lil Rascal reruns... The American Pit Bull Terrier is a true breed, but the term "Pit Bull" has been extended to include several related breeds that look like the Pit Bull.

"Dangerous" is not an essential characteristic of "pit bulls." Read some of the laws banning them and they point to any number of characteristics by which to identify this supposedly dangerous breed, with the exception of: "dangerous" and "aggressive". Banning pit bulls, or the number of breeds umbrella'd under the label "pit bulls" is epistemological laziness, as David colorfully points out. If you believe that temperament is bred into a line of dogs, you must believe that it can be bred out. Which means that temperament is not inherent in a breed. At most, the government might ban breeding of a line which has shown aggression in individuals not trained to that trait, but banning the entire breed for that supposed trait can only lead (once the ban has failed to diminish attacks, as it did in the Netherlands) to banning other breeds, then possibly whole swaths of breeds of certain sizes, until all we have left are yapping papillons and chihuahuas. (To their credit, the Dutchies didn't move on to other breeds, but instead lifted the ban on pits) The pit bull's reputation works both ways, and it is a favorite, by virtue of its status as a fighting dog, among those who own dogs to project power. That means they are raised, in inordinate percentages, either trained for aggression and strength, or neglected and unsocialized as guard dogs, and are therefore far more likely to be involved in attacks against humans. This is at least a contributing factor to the perception of this breed as inherently dangerous. If pits are banned, these types of owners will simply move on to another breed. I get a lot of questions and comments from passing gang bangers about my very intimidating (but totally love-sponging) black Great Dane, and have noted individuals of a certain social persuasion jump over the sea wall to avoid passing too closely to him. If pits are banned, can we expect to see this thread again if five years, debating whether Danes should be banned?

But aren't all of the examples you point to (property, custodial, tax, immigration [however improper], and inheritance rights) properly the function of contracts? shouldn't an individual be allowed to confer these rights (the proper ones) to whomever they choose? Should the state be sanctioning traditional social contracts with no specific contractual obligations, but with implied obligations nevertheless dictated (and modified over time) arbitrarily by the state? (e.g., alimony, custody, division of assets, etc.) How do you establish "serious and permanent relations" as a criterion for marriage law, when in fact, marriages are available on a drive-through basis in some states, and constitutionally have the same weight as marriages based on long, serious courtships? The "essential requirements" you refer to are, in some cases, the ability to sign your name. So it's not an "all-or-nothing" dichotomy, it's a "heterosexual-marriage or ability-to-sign-your-name (if that)" dichotomy. Even if states were inclined to examine personal motives, how would you suggest they objectively codify the "requirements" of marriage, without improperly intruding on an individual's privacy? If we are going to redefine marriage from what it is, then we open that redefinition up to any group -- or individual -- who has his own idea of what "marriage" is. If the logical conclusion of that exercise is that marriage has no objective meaning in law or to the state, then we should remove it from consideration by the state. We should also allow those organizations practicing the ceremony of marriage to include or exclude whoever they well please from their private practices. Otherwise, the state has the obligation to define the term "marriage" based on the interest of the majority, on the same grounds as the one legitimate majority interest you pointed out earlier: language.

There's a contradiction in there. The institution of marriage should either be applied based on majority standards, or it should not be applied at all. It either has a specific meaning, applicable to a specific type of relationship, or it has no meaning, and therefore applicable to any relationship. E.g., if there are no limits to access, shouldn't there be allowed "marriage sites" on the web whereby individuals could match themselves up to maximize the advantages of marriage without necessarily entailing the "messy" aspects of traditional marriage, such as love, commitment, cohabitation, joint bank accounts, sexual relations, procreation and in-laws? That's the crux of the threat recognized by hetero-marriage advocates - if you loosen the definition of marriage on principle, you necessarily obliterate it. If the legal advantages of marriage are available to all individuals, they are no longer "advantages." I'm guessing your unstated point is that there should be no advantages provided by the gov't, and that gov't should not confer any legal status to married individuals, with rights greater than unmarried individuals. If so, then we are in agreement.

No, you are an individual. Your statement is as valid as saying "I am part of two of the most hating minorities in the country." It may be true, but does it say anything true about you? And, rights apply to individuals only.

"It is to the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, and the cannibals (the literal cannibals, this time) -- to the under-developed, the undeveloped, and the not-to-be-developed cultures -- that the Capitalist United States of America is asked to apologize for her skyscrapers, her automobiles, her plumbing, and her smiling, confident, untortured, un-skinned-alive, un-eaten young men!"

How do you argue that the practice was "routinized," when the released memos reveal an obsession with establishing the legality of such "extraordinary measures" as placing a fuzzy caterpillar in a dark cell, prior to using them on one of the top al Qaeda leaders? It seems to me the memos prove that the Bush administration was anything but cavalier with the use of torture, at least at the point the memos were generated. Almost all of the "torture" techniques listed in the memo were lifted from SERE training, that is, they were techniques used to train our own servicemen to withstand "real" torture. I haven't seen a single story about any of the detainees coming out of gitmo with drill wounds to their major joints, eyes gouged out, shock scars, broken ribs, dislocated shoulders or physical/emotional scars of gang rape (a technique used with impunity by Iraqis against our troops - male and female). The point is that "torture" is an ill-defined term these days. If "torture" includes techniques that do not incur lasting physical or psychological damage, as the Bush memos claim, then the term has been diluted. Where do you draw the line on torture? How do you define it? Is it any treatment designed to extract information through the infliction of discomfort? It would seem so. After all, one man might be trained to withstand hours of waterboarding, while another might be unable to handle fingernails on a blackboard. Since tolerance to discomfort is subjective, there is left no room for any attempt to extract information from prisoners, if we address the issue on the "principle" that torture is (always) wrong. From the article: Rational? or rationalization? The premise just jumped from - that torture is used to find out the things we don't know - is ignored in this argument. If you know everything about his operation then there is no reason to interrogate the subject, and certainly no reason to reveal the extent of your intel. If you don't know everything, then letting him know what you do know only accents the importance of protecting what you don't know, not to mention giving him an insight on your knowledge, on which to anchor any further admissions, including lies that match your understanding of his operations. In either case, this strategy is a losing one, and reveals a lack either of logic or understanding, or both, on the part of the author. I think it is important to put torture in the same context as any use of force, i.e., that it can be moral only in retaliation for the subject's use of force against others, and a reasonable belief that he has knowledge relevant to future attacks.

Look up Michelson-Morley and read Einstein's "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." (Special Relativity)

Better hand out reading glasses, too. I think I broke my eyes when I read this version two years ago. Very small print, but - the book itself is about half the size of others.

Most of the money the Fed pumped into the economy since 2001 has gone directly into housing, pumping up housing prices and generally increasing the cost of living. That is, price inflation been concentrated within one sector of the economy, with the diversion of money from other sectors causing a generally stable price level there. The government's estimate of inflation includes apx 24% weighting for homeowners' housing costs, but instead of counting home/mortgage costs, they use owner's equivalent rent, which had a low or negative price inflation over the housing boom years, due to the conversion of renters into homeowners as well as the spike in rentable housing construction. (((how do I import an image so I can show it here?))) If you compare annual rate of change of CMDEBT (household credit market debt) to CPI change, you see a very good correlation between 1967 (as the final vestiges of the gold peg deteriorated under the burden of underlying monetary inflation) and 1983. There's a consistent 5Q lag of inflation behind CMDEBT peaks and dips. Then, in 1983, when the gov't started using OER instead of actual housing market costs, we see inflation magically fall away from CMDEBT, and stay consistently below 6%, and averaging apx 3%. From 2003 til 2006, CMDEBT rose at annual rates approaching 12%. Using the 67-83 period as a guide, CPI should have risen at 9-11%, but because OER distorted the statistic, the gov't reported no more than 4% price inflation. Now we have home prices plummeting, but because so much wealth was tied up in the housing market, our total wealth has dropped significantly and money for other goods is not available, tied up in reliquidating asset books. Note the money multiplier: So we're seeing deflation now as the money continues to sink into struggling banks and as retailers liquidate stock in order to stay in business or to pay off creditors once they go bankrupt. The liquidation of goods is killing manufacturing, which is falling at 10% rate, but it can't continue indefinitely. When the goods have all been liquidated, and money frees up from both financial institutes gaining health and from the global $ sell-off, we'll see a wash of dollars with nothing to buy = inflation.

Are you trying to get us all arrested??? Mebbe it's time someone came back down to Earth and took a few breaths. Your answers, in this context, are: No, no, and no. And no, Jimmy Doolittle was not a war criminal. The comparison of Mr. McVeigh's act to Lt.Col. Doolittle's is particularly despicable.

This was posted yesterday on several "extremist" "right wing" (i.e., pro-capitalism) web sites. It's apparently since been retracted by DHS. The word "recruitment" is used a dozen times in the assessment, but always as the tool of "extremists," and never in reference to an actual organization that would recruit members. The word "group" is used 26 times, and is clearly an ambiguous, sloppy "grouping" of individuals (including a reference to "racial groups"), not a description of an organized entity capable of concerted action. In other words, what we are seeing is an increasing number of individuals who are antagonistic towards "the perception of" an overbearing, increasingly powerful government. How's that for Package Dealing? Note how individuals "rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority" are smeared with anarchists as "antigovernment" "groups." which are then smeared with hate-oriented "groups" as "rightwing extremists." Nice trick. This immediately brought to mind Miss Rand's 1964 essay "Extremism," or the Art of Smearing, CtUI, p 191.

Objective laws also prevent crimes from happening - for instance, drunk driving laws. Would you consider them pre-emptive, indefinite retribution for killing innocent motorists? Or do you consider the act of driving drunk, absent any damage to other motorists, immoral? No, but they can prevent people from making rational decisions which would keep them from committing crimes. logic: A yellow fruit need not be a lemon, but that does not dispute the yellowness of lemons. You're referring to the rights of the drug-user. I'm referring only to the rights of those he would violate in his irrational state of drug use. That's the crux of the discussion. Rights imply rationality. We can't go around deeming people irrational without turning into thought police, but we can set standards of rationality based on presence/absence of chemicals known to impair rationality. That is the core justification for drunk driving and drunk in public laws, and it could be equally valid for drug use. The combination of the chemically-induced irrationality and the chemical dependence that can override rationality even when the user is down, provide a justification for preventative proscription of such drugs, at least for individuals who have shown that they are unable to act rationally after choosing to use the drug. Once such a person makes that one decision, he has abrogated his rationality, and therefore his rights. The final leap in this logical chain is to decide that that decision should therefore be illegal. There are plenty of choices people who are not prison are "prevented" from making. Even in a proper society, that would be the case, and they would be prevented by objective laws. Outside of prison they are prevented by threat of force, rather than actual force, which is the case for inmates. Drunk driving is a good wedge into this issue, because I believe most of us agree that those are good, objective laws (at least in principle). They are based on a loss of rationality in the context of an act which can easily lead to violation of others' rights. Drug use laws are based on the same principle, but because the threat of violation of others' rights is not as clear cut, there is some dispute as to whether drug laws are moral. Would we justify anti-heroin laws on the basis that 10% of heroin users (including, presumably one-timers) become addicted, and have a very low rate of recovery? If we could show that the percentage of heroin users who commit crimes against others is similar to the percentage of drunk drivers who violate others' rights, would that justify such a law? Objective laws can be based on probabilities, right? Else any preventative law would be immoral. I guess that last point is the one I'm really getting at. Is drunk driving a non-objective, and therefore immoral law?

I drew an uptight guidance counselor over a urinal once in junior high... Is it really a principle of Objectivism that hypotheticals are unusable in the exploration of principles? (leaving aside the "fantastical" label) To bring it down to a non-fantastical hypothetical that I'm [almost] sure you will accept as likely, suppose a person becomes addicted to a drug, and under the influence of that drug, commits a series of crimes. Would you find it immoral to set, as a condition of his release into society (following the length of incarceration prescribed for the specific crimes he committed), a drug test to ensure that the drug whose use caused him to commit the crimes was not present in his blood? Should such a person be allowed to choose whether to use that drug, knowing the effect it has on him? Or do you reject the concept that a person's use of drugs might render him incapable of acting rationally?

I think you're misusing the concept "relationship" when applying it to the repulsive force of two electrons. The concept force is derived from the observation of several relationships of two entities, including time, distance, and mass. The behavior [of the relationships] of two electrons provides insight into the concept of "charge" which, related to force, conceptually explains why two electrons tend to fly away from each other. If you use the concept "relationship" properly, then you could say that it is secondary to attribute, since a relationship is determined by the similarity of the attributes of two entities. For instance, the distance between two electrons is determined by their distance as compared to (i.e., measured by) the distance of a given standard that serves as a unit of measure. Relationships exist in reality, but the relationships we perceive are limited by our sensory capabilities, and chosen by us in the concept-formation process of differentiation and integration. But then again, it is the relationship of an attribute of an entity to a given standard of that attribute that provides the conceptual identification of the attribute, so there's no real way of asserting primacy of one over the other. I believe that Megan's comment wrt to entities and attributes is equally as valid wrt to attributes and relationships. They are inseparable.

So's a gun We do when those stupid mistakes entail the use of force against others, whether or not that use is voluntary. Here's an assertion: If a drug, used a single time, necessarily created an inability to act rationally wrt to others' rights, it would be necessary to ban that substance. From that moral principle (assuming you agree with the assertion), it is a matter of degrees to decide if the use of certain substances, and the consequential inability to behave rationally, should be banned. If you disagree with that, then please provide a solution for the problem of permanently morally-disabled drug addicts. Does that solution entail jails and asylums? -- who will pay for them? Does the solution involve killing the addicts? Who will fire the bullets, bury the bodies, pay for the process? If an action is intrinsically (yes, intrinsically) immoral, that is, if it leads to involuntary behavior that impacts (with force) the lives of others, then government has the right and responsibility to restrict that action. What am I missing?

A little off-topic, but I've read on these pages people unequivocally supporting the use of "recreational" drugs (as distinguished from the "recreational use of drugs"), but how does that play out when people become addicted and lose the ability to act volitionally wrt drugs? Does morality end at the point of a needle, when that needle physically forces a person to act against his well being? Are we ok with legalizing morphine, knowing that dealers will work diligently to get kids hooked and create a steady flow of sales? Also, wrt to Thomas' other example, is there any good evidence that prostitution is not largely fed by pimps who use force/drugs to get young girls and boys into the street life? Is partaking of prostitution moral if you know that your demand will support the further use of force against innocents? In other words, aren't there actions whose morality goes beyond a man's personal values, and which entail the support of the intrinsically immoral initiation of force against others, or one's self? (edit: punct)

I meant to put a smiley..

Rand?

Obama is middle of the road in rhetoric only, or more precisely, he is all over the road rhetorically. If you look into his past education, actions and associations, prior to his emergence on the political scene, you see a man who actively sought out and became steeped in Marxist ideology and Black Liberation Theology. I don't know how one can minimize the socialist streak of a man who continually asserts that this nation was founded on the principle that "I am my brother's keeper." That claim, taken down to its concrete implications, leads one to nothing short of oppressive socialism. The best you can say about Obama is that his rhetoric is mere abstraction, disconnected from reality, and that he doesn't understand what the concept "keeper" entails. The worst is that he does. In neither case can one make the claim that he is an ideological moderate (unless, in the former case, by "moderate," you mean "void").

What could be more fitting? A gang of philosophical cannibals proposing actual cannibalism! You want chips with that?

AS is Objectivism applied in totality to an imaginary, author-controlled place and time. The non-fiction works apply Objectivism to the real world. Tying the unmistakable trajectory of AS' world to the occasionally recognized segments and points of an apparently similar trajectory in the real world allows one to capture the overall essence of the truth of Objectivism as it applies to the large scale workings of reality. AS provides a unifying analogy, and in its details, analogies to individual persons and events, that allow one to organize the integration of one's perceptions, and of the concepts contained within the non-fiction. But also contained within AS is a complete, running conceptual development of Objectivist philosophy in the context of the story. I read AS first, but I did not "get" the philosophy from the book. Rather, I found a desire to learn what that philosophy was. I've read and re-read, re-listened virtually all of Rand's works. Each time I reread a work, I find that I can better integrate the concepts in the context of the overall conceptual framework. Each time I reread AS in this context, I am better able to grasp the significance of that work. I guess you could call yourself an "Objectivist" without having read AS, in the sense that the philosophy might guide your choices and sense of life. But I don't believe you could, with a straight face, claim to thoroughly understand Objectivism without having read the single unifying explanation of it. One might just as well ask if one must read any of Rand's work to consider oneself an Objectivist: You might be, but how would you know???

Jake is right on. McCain was offered an early repatriation, in part so that his captors could demonstrate that American elites would accept special treatment as a matter of course. McCain correctly (in that limited context) refused to take the early release and play into NV propaganda. Also, remember that McCain's life was saved by his fellow prisoners, and he felt an obligation to maintain solidarity with them. Believing that his status would increase his chances of survival, he may have seen staying as a way to pay back his fellow POW's by spreading the mantle of his celebrity over them. I think McCain made a choice in the matter based on his personal system of values at the time. Peikoff seems to have forgotten that "morality ends at the point of a gun."

Ahh, I see the problem... No action can be taken out of context. When I say a person is "forced" to take an action, I mean that another person is using (the threat of) force to compel a desired action from him. If the person rebels against the intent of that force and takes another action, then that action is volitional. It is "forced," in the non-exact colloquial sense of the term, by the situation, just as any action is "forced" by the context of the situation. So I could agree that DeSantis was "forced" (using your definition) to make a choice in the context of this situation different from what he would have made in a different context. But, then, I wouldn't really be saying anything, would I? Again, there's a problem... Read her definition (which is pretty close to DeSantis'): "The moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest."

He was not forced to give his money to charity. He chose to do so, to make the point that charity is an individual choice, not a collective mandate. How do you figure he is being "forced," specifically, to give his money to charity? (v. giving it back to AIG)