ex_banana-eater

What do you mean internet crackpots? I said these were clips from Fox News. Are you illiterate?

Sorry, I'm just saying that's pretty much going to be the position of an experienced Objectivist. They would say morality is for living your life, and deliberating over ideas like this is a waste of time. Why do you care?

Actually, you can get it delivered to you from Japan. Yesasia.com is a good place to start. Also, try to contact a shop in Nowheresville, Japan and see if they will ship you manga.

If you "sample" someone's music by taking their property without the compensation they require (you don't just listen to a sample on Amazon or something, which they allowed), then you've withheld monetary support, by definition, the whole time that you've stolen the property.

Avoiding a tendency to rationalism, having true integrity in action to all of my values (ie not letting a feeling control me and choose to procrastinate or something else), trying to base my self-esteem solely on my evaluation of my mind rather than external things.

Alright, my answer is: Who cares?

I saw this on the news during the emergency. Too bad I didn't save a clip. However, there's tonnes of clips online where people are forced into government shelters and not allowed to leave, even to get sunlight, while there are dead bodies and feces all around them. It was all over the news. You can find them easily, including on the Oath Keeper's website, as I think I remember a clip on Fox News on the Oath Keeper's Youtube video where an approximately 80 year old woman is tackled and injured by the government agents to surrender her weapon. I believe she suffers injuries.

If I can kill a hostage, why can't I kill the kidnapper? I remember in Batman, one ship had to choose whether to blow up the other before the timer ran out. I would have jumped overboard.

Are supply side economics an economic theory? If not, what kind of theory are they?

Have you actually viewed the Oath Keeper pledge? I think they make it clear that they will stop obeying orders in the event of a dictatorship. Look at the specific orders they refuse to obey. This group is not anti-Obama, is bi-partisan, and I've never heard of them talking about disobeying Obama's orders as such, unless they're clear calls for dictatorship like those 10 in their pledge. You are doing a great disservice against this organization by not honestly evaluating their stance.

I think the solution to wasting time deliberating choices is to make a secondary choice about making a decision time limit. For example, limit yourself to deliberating over the best netbook to buy for only 1 hour of focussed research (or whatever, depending on your income). Get direction to the best reviews online, get pointed to the netbooks that look most valuable for you, and then just make a choice at the end of that hour. There is probably no point deliberating the minutae, such as, "The ASUS netbook is $30 more expensive but comes with a touchpad, whereas the Acer netbook is $30 cheaper." If you have a fairly good job, then your time is valuable and the opportunity cost for deliberating over this stuff rather than just buying increases. Who really cares about the $30 if it took you 3 extra hours of research to save it? You could make that in less than an hour, generally. That's my policy now since I've spend too much time on these things in the past. As long as the time saved is reinvested into production, creation, or peace of mind on your behalf, it will be worth it.

I have a question about this region-DRM encoding. Does anyone know what the companies want us to do with this stuff? Here's my situation. I bought a tonne of Korean DVDs in Korea (which are not available in Canada) so I could practice listening to Korean for fun, in my spare time. I never actually watched them in Korea, as I had Korean TV and radio to watch for free. So now I have them in Canada and I realized that playing them on my computer DVD player with Windows Media Center caused a message that said "This is not available in your region." However when I play the DVD's with other media players, they work. Additionally, my girlfriend's laptop which is usually at my house, plays the DVDs in every situation since it is of Korean origin. Another thing, the DVD player for my living room TV plays the DVD's as well with no problems. So now that I discovered this region coding, what am I morally bound to do? I thought the purpose of the region coding is for price fixing in a certain region. Since I bought the DVDs in Korea rather than importing them cheaply to avoid domestic prices, shouldn't using them here be okay? Also, I can't even find these DVDs available in Canada with region 1 encoding, which makes me believe they wouldn't mind since they didn't produce an alternative. But I'm still not sure--most people wouldn't even know about this if they had just played the DVD in my living room DVD player.

What am I evading? We don't follow the virtues because a negative emotion (stemmed only from the fact of feeling immoral) would result if we violated the virtues. We follow the virtues because a negative effect from being in conflict with reality would result. No, not at all, this is why we need a whole virtue devoted to this called integrity when an emotion in contradiction with your values comes up. I don't think one immediately sees a whole situation fully and clearly, especially when you're battling your emotions. It often takes a lot of thought.

That would not be a necessary effect of stealing the material, it would be an effect of telling people. Anyway, you didn't answer my question and I am seriously puzzled why any of you follow the Objectivist ethics if you can't give an egoistic reason not to steal copyrighted material in this instance. There should be a reason, apart from getting caught or apart from obeying one's morals for morality's sake, in which I would be harmed from doing this. Afterall, that's the reason the Objectivist ethics were created.

I wouldn't hold any guilt for something that I could only see benefits me. Regardless of this, the reason why we practice the virtues is not for themselves, but because violating them cause problems in one's life even if they aren't aware of the said virtues. There would be no reason to practice the Objectivist virtues in this instance if the only negative downside to violating them is that one would feel guilt for breaking them--then one could just throw them out in that particular instance and say they didn't apply there. No, I disagree and all the Objectivist literature disagrees that you will automatically recognize how the concretes will harm you. Look at Tara Smith's discussion of integrity in Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics. She says it takes a consistent state of full focus and deliberate thought in order to see the harmful consequences when your emotions run up against your principles.

Re-read what I wrote. Applying a moral principle means laying down an abstract to a particular situation and seeing how the principle will benefit you in that situation. In no way could "applying a moral principle" mean "violate the moral principle" which is what you seem to have gleaned from that paragraph.

I disagree. What I am doing is exactly what the virtue of integrity demands. A pragmatist would say "let's evaluate this action without principles." I am saying "My principles say this would effect me negatively, so let's see how it would actually effect my negatively so I don't have to continually battle against my emotions."

To put it more accurately, I should have said what are the short or long term negative effects of the single, isolated action that my emotions tempt me to do. Of course anyone can reply with "It will impede long term happiness" but that doesn't make the issue real to me and calm the emotions since it is so abstract. A good example would be like this: "I know it's wrong to lie, but what if I get away with this little white lie to my mother about not doing my homework." And then somebody replied with, "In that single instance, you will have to become a slave to that lie, and further create more lies in your mind just to keep it consistent. She may ask you what you studied today, and you'll further become a slave, because it's all connected."

Right, but as rational egoists, we don't just refer to principles, the principles are guides to tell us that each individual act will have immediate negative consequences. If we look and keep full focus on the situation, then we can see those immediate negative consequences. That's because immediate guilt over the action is not a product of a long-term break from reality. That guilt you mentioned is just a trained reaction. So if we were to judge by "guilt" for that act, and make our decision based on that, it would be hedonism. Now, I know that happiness is impossible to those who take irrational actions, but your bringing up of guilt for another person is not what results from irrational actions. Confusion and uncertainty stemming from not being able to deal with reality is what results from irrational actions, in the long term. No, I am concerned with the material, psychological, and spiritual effects on my life. But all that was provided were general principles like "acting irrationally does not lead to happiness" when I was looking for some type of immediate example why this particular act would be harmful to me psychologically. Of course I know that acting irrationally hurts. What I need to do, though, to make this feeling go away, is to see how even in this instance, violating my moral principle would not be good for me. And that means applying the moral principle as a concrete and seeing the potential negative results in this concrete situation, not just referring to the moral principle as an end in itself. Well, I never once said that so drop it right now.

I commend you on your effort to answer but this is not what I'm looking for. As I stated, I know that stealing would be a violation of my principles, and I notice how such an action would violate my principles and that violation of my principles leads to negative results (abstractly). But in order to have integrity under Objectivism, you need to use full focus and look at the situation, to see why this particular instance would harm me. What you wrote here is that it would contradict my abstract principles--as I said I already know that. What is going to happen negatively from this one action, immediately? Every single act of immorality has an immediate negative outcome on the agent according to Objectivism, so why can't I see this immediate outcome? I think that your argument that guilt will eventually begin is false. An egoist really shouldn't have that much guilt for the sake of other people anyway (you mentioned "guilt" for "crimes against others"), violating a moral principle should cause guilt with himself for damaging himself. But I can't see the immediate damage that will come. In other words, I'm not looking for a philosophical treatise or a discussion on Objectivist meta-ethics since I am familiar with everything you wrote there. I'm looking for why this particular act would be bad for me.

Why do you not steal copyrighted material? Why would stealing it effect you negatively? At the moment, the only thing that is emotionally "real" to me is the benefit of obtaining the material. So I'm asking what are the effects in reality from stealing it that will decidedly hurt my ability to live. No, if I told myself not to feel guilty I would not feel guilty. What you're advocating there is hedonism anyway--I don't need to reference a feeling to find out if something is the right or wrong course of action.

The idea that failure is superior for either strength gains or muscular hypertrophy has 1) Never been proven in the literature 2) Been repeatedly proven false for strength in experimental studies published in medical literature, and is decidedly inferior for strength compared to some general routines that don't incorporate failure.

I was not commenting on the story itself, just on situations that may be similar. I don't know enough about this case obviously, and the fact that most of the information only comes from her side doesn't help, but the fact that she mentioned she was brainwashed and molested by him since she was very young makes her inculpable. There are similar cases of rape, where the girl somewhat "willingly" has sex with a family member for years, because she has been extremely abused since childhood and trained to have sex with the family member. In those cases, it is certainly still rape even if she seems to "willingly" do it as a teenager. Obviously this is a case where an 'Objectivist society' just like today's regular society, should have a psychological expert present.

None of these questions are what I'm looking for. I need examples of why this will harm me, because I only undertake actions that benefit me as an egoist. "Will I be upset if I take it?" doesn't provide me with some kind of negative result I was looking for.

In general, if a woman is a hostage to a pimp or to an abusive husband, where she is under the threat of murder if she leaves or tells the police, I think it is a clear case of self-defense to kill the slaveholder, and that killing would certainly have to be "pre-meditated."