kainscalia

It is tedious to argue back and forth with someone who is constantly being a Devil's Advocate when he expects other people to do his thinking for him. You have admitted that part of you fears to have unanswered questions after reading thousands of pages. Instead, then, you have decided to skip the aspect of personal research and instead have come here to treat the board and its members as your personal oracle. You pretend to benefit from the experience and knowledge of others while offering nothing more in return than the questions themselves, unnecessarily lengthy and verbose. In short, you're expecting to get something for nothing. It's not a matter of fearing your demonic advocacy, it's a matter of seeing little value in them.

I get the impression that if you go fast enough, it'll leap through time!

I always love how people like this seem to be against certainty of certainty, but are all for certainty of uncertainty.

Also. Branden is not an objectivist. The guy believes in ghosts and psychic powers.

Yes, it's the "You can't be certain of that/anything" / "There are no Absolutes!" crowd. They're dumb enough that they give you the means to defeat them: "Then how are you certain that you can't be certain of that/anything?" "Isn't THAT an absolute statement?"

Take him throuh a stroll of "introduction to objectivist epistemology" and see how he substantiates his claims.

There's really nothing to be gained from talking to you any longer. You are a mystic who clearly has nothing in common with the philosophy. Though I must congratulate you: If it was formlessness that you sought, then you have achieved it in your thought process.

Woops, didn't finish my post, hah! anyways, I was going to say- the closest I've ever gotten to smoking a pipe is when I had one in my mouth when I sang the role of Hindley in Carlisle Floyd's opera "Wuthering Heights." I rather liked the look, even if I was playing a complete bastard:

I love the smell of pipe tob. actually, but I have refrained from smoking anything all my life- to smoke at all would be suicidal with my career. Still, I don't mind if someone smokes a pipe around me at one point or another occasionally.

Bluey, I am not too surprised at the Atlasphere- the majority of its denizens are TOC-goers. One thing I have observed about TOC is its incredible consistency in being inconsistent: they condemn Rand's methods, her personality, or the Ayn Rand Institute, but allegedly still hold to their own version of the philosophy and her vision whilst judging Rand by the Politcally Correct standards of an altruist viewpoint. They're certainly an interesting bunch.

In the movie, as presented, the humans were barely human in any way. You are focusing on the fact that almost-neanderthals with high technology attacked primitives with low technology instead of focusing on the fact that the whole movie is a farce meant to paint humanity in the most negative light possible and the aliens (the non-human) as the more evolved lifeform. Sure, they had no right to attack- but also no company that was run the way it was run would have survived long enough to make it to Pandora in the first place, it would have fallen apart at the seams.

I would rather we not get entangled with the particulars of the movie because it's not about those. It's a lifeboat situation. The movie and Cameron try to subvert metaphysics by playing "if": "Let's pretend there is a race of blue fungus-people symbiotically connected to this giant tree...[\I] when that if is established, Cameron tries to make a case for collectivism, while making "individualists" seem monstruous in comparison by using the age-old trick of writing every character of that side with the approximate IQ of Micah. What seems to be escaping most here is that in order to make his impassionate point "work", Cameron had to create an actual USB collective mind (something that, to our knowledge, does not exist among rational creatures) while lobotomizing 99% of his human characters. The issue is not that a certain form of collectivism is not unreasonable for the Na'vi since they're essentially biological flash drives, the issue is that Cameron is holding up the Na'vi as an example for humanity, which us ridiculous since 1) they are fictitious and 2) our biological natures are vastly different and therefore impossible to emulate. The sense of depression some people have experienced is precisely because they feel deep down in themselves that they have just been philosophically chastised for being human and requiring individuality to exist due to their nature as rational individuals. The whole angle of the movie is that to be human is bad and to reinforce it it presents the most poorly written cases of human stupidity ( who never would have survived their positions that long with their Modus Operandi) while the only truly sensible humans (Doctor Sigourney Weaver-- sorry, she's always Sigourney to me----- and the tough as nails female pilot) end up dying (I'm not counting the two Hollywood Sidekicks, since they were there mostly out of necessity). The protagonist in the end abandons his own humanity in order to be Na'vi (I.e. better than Human) his disability is merely the excuse that Cameron uses in he script to execute this conversion at the end of the movie and thus underline his statement. Written as it is, Avatar is meant to be an attack on humanity, individualism and rational self interest.

This is good, don't you see? They have to keep pumping steam into the Obamanation Hope Machine (Which can't hold a candle to the Miami Sound Machine IMNSHO) because Obama's public angel has lost a great deal of its feathers. And Germany... don't get me started on Germany. they've never been sane, ever, just look at what they do to opera there.

Nature does not "care", Steve. You honestly need to stop personifying it because that moves you from the realm of scientific fact ("birds have developed x instincts as a mechanism of survival within objectve reality") to a predeterminist argument at the hands of a supernatural entity ("Mother Nature takes care if you"). If you want to be taken seriously you need to calm down with the allegorical personifications here. Getting rid of the Buddhist nonsense wouldn't hurt either.

The question here is this, threesixty: Is it proper for you to fail to defend yourself and that which you know to be the good, because an immoral dictator or thug is holding innocents hostage? Again, we must remember that there can be no morality applied at the point of a gun, and the steps the dictator in question has taken towards pushing you and others into such a state can only fall on his shoulders. The situation is intolerable, I agree, when you have to contemplate the possibility of harming innocents, but it is important to understand that it is not you who has taken that decision--- it is the tyrants who have. In fact, terrorists and tyrants count on the scruples of the pacifists to grant them permanence: they know that your first reaction will probably be to let them be so that no innocents are harmed- just like the Palestinian terrorists who hide their caches and their members amongst innocent civilians- they are counting on the good to be impotent when held hostage. Unfortunately there is something you are not taking into consideration in this scenario: By letting the tyrant be, you are essentially sanctioning the continuation of his tactics and the many victims of them to come in the future. While innocents may indeed be harmed by storming the throne room -so to speak- you have to realize that in this case it is a lose-lose scenario: innocents will die, whether by the hand of the totalitarian government or as victims of accidental friendly fire. No thinking and rational human being likes that, but the point is that you need to understand that what you like and what has to be done at times are two different things altogether. You are reacting to a series of violent events and attack initiated by a thug, all you can morally do is defend yourself and destroy the thug by whatever means necessary (since we're talking about an actual dictatorship here, this means they are beyond the court of civil law and in the realm of military action) to ensure your safety and his neutralization. After all is said and done, the innocents who were killed in the attack are not to be blamed on those who resisted and fought against the tyrant, but on the tyrant himself- and, should he still be alive after it, he should be made to pay their deaths (on top of all other accumulated crimes) with the harshest possible sentence. You can try and take all precautions and do everything within your power to keep innocents safe. It may work, or it may not work at all because the tyrant *will* use them to his benefit. It is regrettable and sad that innocents are killed, but it essentially boils down to this: Pacifism is the stance that you will not allow yourself to go to war against an immoral thug who has initiated force against you and others because you do not want to have the blood of possible innocents, in your hands, so essentially you would prefer that the thug slaughter them by himself and thus free you from emotional anxiety. Philosophically, aren't you sacrificing the innocents there for the sake of feeling better about yourself by not participating in the killing? Sometimes when you do the right thing things don't always turn out well, because someone got there first and started breaking everything. All that refraining from stopping this person will do is allow them to do it over and over and over again. What could possibly be the Good in that?

To be fair I imagined that 360 would probably be gone by this point, but I thought it would be helpful to have a full and very explicit reply for reference's sake in case we ever have someone with the same angle to his questions. I am not entirely sure 360 was interested in learning something about Objectivism as he was in actively finding out on what he could disagree with the philosophy- but this is speculation, and if 360 is around still I wouldn't mind being corrected.

360, if you're even still around, I think you need to sit down and first think about this in the following manner: * What has been Iran's position, as far as the initiation of force, since the 70s? Has it been a pacifist country? Has it refrained from supporting terrorist groups, funded operations against other countries (the US in particular) etcetera? * If you find, as you will undoubtedly find unless your historical research is incomplete, that Iran has constantly been an aggressor or supporter of aggression (which is the *initiation* of force)- what is the proper way of dealing with it? You advocate pacifism, and I think you are not fully grasping the position of Objectivism towards force: No-one may initiate force against anyone. To initiate force when none has been used is to reject that we are thinking, rational beings and we are capable of solving our disputes through rational methods. However, when someone initiates force against you it is immoral for you not to defend your life from an action that seeks to destroy it and the values upon which it has been founded. By being the initiator of force, Iran has renounced any protection from force - what is worse, Iran is a forceful thug with its own populace, ranging from its oppressive and stifling, primitive laws to the suppression of protests and free speech, to the cold-blooded murder of people like Neda Aghan Soltani. As a purveyor of terror without and within, it is one of the most corrupt and debauched governments on earth, and an abomination to anyone who claims logic and individual rights as their standards of life for the individual. I understand that you may be attracted to the prospect of peace as an inclusion of the desire to solve problems rationally and through intelligent discourse--- however, there are men with whom you cannot dialogue, men who want nothing more than to watch the world burn under their feet. You can't sit down to eat with the cannibal simply because he is holding a fork. Part of knowing the good is to uphold the good, even though sometimes the actions may be to your dislike. But the responsibility for those actions does not fall with you, but rather it is the initiator of violence who bears all the responsibility, as by his actions he has forced you into a situation in which you either engage in force to defend your life or lose it in the long or short term. War may be 'hell on earth', but if it is then it is the hell the initiator of force has begged for with open arms. When force is brought into the argument it boils down to whether you approach the situation with justice and give each party what they deserve in accordance to their actions in the context of objective reality, or wait for them to visit whatever irrational destruction they value unto you.

I finally decided to write about this movie after hearing the racist allegations, and seeing how many people here seem to have gotten muddled over the core of the movie. Avatar, Racist? Try Anti-Life. Every time Hollywood tries to depict an ‘original’ tribal species, we usually end up with several sensibilities being offended (as it is common in an age where people seem to think that opinions are tantamount to rights.) We all remember the ridiculous fiasco of Jar-Jar Binx, of course, a character who was not really as much of a racial stereotype as people claimed he was- but I suspect that that was merely an excuse used by people who were as annoyed as I was to let Lucas know that this whole New Trilogy idea wasn’t working out. It failed miserably, but at least the twerp kept his beak shut for the next two cinematic torture sessions. Now that AVATAR has hit the movie theaters, we have the likes of Robinne Lee crying foul over racial stereotyping and ‘white savior fantasies’ in the movie, and James Cameron denying it has anything to do with race at all. For once (and only once) in his cinematic life, Cameron is right: What’s wrong with this movie isn’t that it is racist, but that it is philosophically bankrupt: The Na'Vi are poor (but expensively rendered) rip-offs of the Noble Savage stereotype, a throwback to the more embarrassing era of literature in which any underdeveloped civilization was seen as 'more pure' and 'innocent' and therefore superior to evil industrialized West with its ghastly materialistic values such as health, progress, comfort... Such portrayals often gloss over inevitable realities as, for example, medical and scientific technology (how many Na'Vi children and mothers die at birth, obviously having no obstetricians? What is old for a Na'Vi, the ripe old age of forty?) in favor of painting this idyllic, bucolic and rather ridiculous "One with the earth" image of the Noble Savage. The inevitable point of contention here is that in reality -the plane we all inhabit- the bucolic term "one with nature" usually means the abandonment of all 'evil' technology (because technology and industry are evil things to both the Noble Savage proponents and its historical descendants, the Environmentalists), which usually results in really being 'one with nature', such as being inside the stomach of a predator, or being part of a compost heap by the twilight age of thirty-five. The other half of the equation lies in a portrayal of the Westerners that makes them out to be absolute brutish villains. Why are they evil and brutish, the Noble Savagist/Ecologist asks in false rhetoric? Why, it's because of his corrupt ways and technology! Industrialization, according to the Virgin Earth proponents, is evil (evil enough that it has given us the longest lifespan in our history, and freed up our time so we don't have to spend nineteen hours a day toiling the soil, dying from gangrene, etc) and only after the Westerner abandons Western culture does he become Truly Noble -- such is the case with Avatar's protagonist who, when he abandons western culture and becomes like the Na'Vi, is even more superlative at being Na'Vi than the Na'Vi are! This ideological befuddlement is not a plot flaw of “Avatar”, but rather it is the very essence of its Noble Savage root: The Noble Savage exists only to point Western Man in the direction of an ideal which they themselves cannot accomplish - only the Un-westernized westerner can. Are you still with me? It’s not about race, race is the red herring that confuses the argument here: the whole core of The Noble Savage is to say that Man is only Man when he stops being Man (that is, he is only man when he becomes mystical, superstitious, abandons technology and the scientific method, and is reduced to the life style and expectancy of a Neanderthal.) Forget the aspect of race, the Na’Vi – and in the past the Hollywood Native Americans, the Literary Natives Of Fictitious Islands and so on and so forth- are only cardboard cutout poster children for an ideology (from Primitivism to the current Environmentalism) that wants nothing more than to see humanity reduced to its poorest state: huddled by a campfire and paralyzed by fear.

First time I've taken this test, and apparently I'm an ENTP, The Inventor

Where have I heard this type of argument before?Ah, yes, "No-one can disprove the existence of God, because the certainty of his existence comes through faith, which exists outside of reason." Got any more of that snakeskin oil you're peddling?

Most schools in the country I was born (Ecuador) were private. Usually sending your kids to Public School meant you would get the worst education, and that essentially you'd have to pray and hope they wouldn't come out criminals. There are many private schools in Ecuador that are priced quite high. There are also many, including the one I went to, that were priced quite low and, although lacking in the latest technology, could deliver a *solid* education. I had philosophy as a subject, which is something most american public schools have never even contemplated.

These two are no small items, and they represent the very core of the movie's 'message,' such as it is. Essentially it is 'Ferngully' with pumped-up graphics.

Well, all you need to do is look at the kind of things they do accept as real philosophies. Forgetting Kant (don't we wish we could?) and his cronies, the more immediate chronological example of Derrida should really say it all.

Nope, it's more like this: You misunderstand everything because you're trying to smash it into a Heideggerian framework. Square pegs don't go into round holes.

I am honored that you chose to quote my reply here to indicate the genesis of this great thread of yours.