Grames

Just to expand on this thought a little ... It's hardly pure altruism either, as caring for the offspring of the self is caring for the self. In a modern technical sense we know that children are at least half identical in their genetic heritage. Given that knowledge it is now literally impossible to understand caring for the young as selfless even in the most materialistic flesh-bound and concrete-bound mentality. There is also wider and more abstract extended sense of self that comes from being in the company of merely like minded people who are unrelated, and valuing their understanding as your own understanding and consequently valuing the person as a whole to some degree. I agree that mere generosity is wrong, but because there is a profound selfishness involved not because there is anything but destructiveness in altruism.

Donald Trump versus Bernie Sanders is going to be like the Nixon vs McGovern blowout but a bigger blowout because Trump is actually a great president.

Rather than make a new thread I thought I would tack this entry onto this existing thread. quantamagazine.org: Quantum Leaps, Long Assumed to Be Instantaneous, Take Time nature.com Letter: To catch and reverse a quantum jump mid-flight

Do you really think it would be likely to remain that way if Bernie became President Sanders? What kind of federal judiciary and Supreme Court nominations would he make? Do you think it would be worth it to have America endure an avowed socialist as President if it gets Trump out of office?

Put the social media down for your own benefit. Seriously. Mouse Utopia experiments

Those are the people you need to be the most careful about, in practice.

What is evil here is the 12 year necromancy involved in raising this thread from the dead.

LOL man, that describes me. He does a better job at pretending, and actually has done the reading. That "consent of the governed" is malarkey was news to me and worth sharing. Civic nationalism isn't a viable option in most of the world because most places (not America) are not founded with a purpose but are just the people who live there and whom do not possess a common liberal civic culture after subtracting their religion, non-religious culture, economy, language and shared history. Yet those nations (nations are people not their political arrangements) still want their own states and should have them. Civic nationalism wouldn't be enough to hold America together either in the absence of its shared history, culture, common language, economy and religious background. It would be great if a rights-based civic nationalism could be more widespread but it isn't yet and ethnic nationalism appears to be a prerequisite stage to make a rights-based civic nationalism possible.

For this nonfiction book and most of what is published by non-Objectivists, my method is to look for a way to recast the case in a way that is compatible or more compatible with Objectivist premises. So yes, I do brush aside Hazony's errors because that is only to be expected from a non-Objectivist and its not my job or my interest to defend his errors. Nevertheless, I found value in the book and also found that the most significant bits can be reframed to be better. I thought his chapter 10 was quite good at destroying the "consent of the governed" canard, but even there I felt the need to supply the replacement theory of my own that " the state is founded upon compliance not consent." The was a huge thread here a few years ago about the morality of taxation and it ultimately boiled down to who was consenting to what and when did they consent. Now I am of the opinion that consent is subjective and therefore unworkable as an objective basis for defining government, but compliance is objective.

This is a key point that merits dwelling on for a bit. Consider the kinds of things that have easily comprehended meaning: words, concepts, symbols. Meaning is reference. Life, each living thing, exists in a primary way as itself with its own identity. Life and living things are not symbols or signs that refer to something else. Conclusion: life is not the kind of thing that can even have meaning. What people really want to know is the purpose of life. They want to know if all life has the same purpose or what their individual purpose is. Purpose comes from the bottom up: you make your purpose or find it in what you are doing or have done or aspire to do. Just get on with doing things and a multitude of potential purposes will present themselves for to choose from, and in hindsight what you have spent your time and energy upon has been your particular purpose(s).

I don't think Hazony is responsible ( is the original creator or composer) for most of the rationale presented here. For those who don't have the book I did reproduce the extensive footnotes showing Hazony's sources. He gave his evidence in citations. Is early or late Mises the true Mises? I would take the later version as more true as wider integration takes more time. For the same reason I take later Rand over Nietzschean Rand or Fountainhead Rand. For some reason thinkers with a utopian bent come around to the conclusion that the state should wither away. Its the tell I look for, and its absence is why I don't regard Rand as a utopian. All of this is just failing to see the forest because of all the trees obscuring the view. From Aristotle's Prime Mover onward everyone of those thinkers had a metaphysical root of their thought that was equivalent to God to gods. All of their elaborations of rights don't change that.

Right. Hazony is religious and it shows. But lots of religious people have discovered true principles that were poorly justified on religious grounds. Rights are valid but not because they come from God.

Refresh my memory and that of others reading this, what is the distinction between metaphysical and political freedom? There is some concept that relates them, if I recall correctly.

Hazony's PragerU video on the Enlightenment was bad. That does not weaken what I consider to be the good argument for nationalism. That argument is that because volition exists it is immoral to impose by force alien political systems upon a people, even if that political system is one of individual rights.

It is well done and short. In general and by design, social media does not reward virtue. https://youtu.be/1n_cPIhag28

Public roads are not a commons, they belong to the government as property. That property does not belong to you therefore you have no right to use and dispose of it (or dispose on it) as if it were.

Is there a successful strategy that does not begin with killing the Iranians in Iraq? We already don't have an embassy in Iran, so they come down to Baghdad to attack the embassy. Trump forestalled a war by disrupting the planned further attacks on Americans in Iraq. The strategy Trump is enacting is to keep America out of a full blown war and to use economic power instead. Thus, his withdrawal from the Obama giveaway not-a-treaty and revival of all the sanctions and economic blockade measures. If more American bombing is required, Iran can kiss its entire oil industry goodbye. Lets see if Karg Island can actually be sunk. (per wikipedia as of 2012, Karg oil terminal in the Persian Gulf handled 98% of Iranian oil exports). That won't take a war. Now that America is a net oil exporter, a mideast war that raises the price of oil benefits America. Iranian oil goes to China anyway, so we get to fuck over China too. Win-win.

Relevant video linked below. The Fantasy of Ultimate Purpose – How Our Entertainment Reveals Our Deepest Desire

Objective does not mean, cannot mean, omitting all personal preferences when the action contemplated is essentially about what to do with your person, where to go, what to eat , etc. That one dislikes one of the choices is a fact that should be included in the decision. Whether or not one should dislike that choice (and not all dislikes are voluntary) is a different question to be taken up at a different time.

Well, yes. Otherwise you are partaking in gossip. The hiring of hitmen, fleeing the country and the fraud arrest are reliable facts (as far as I have followed this thread). That counts as evidence and therefore some degree of proof exists toward a negative evaluation. Is there anything even remotely approaching that degree of criminality in Trump's life?

Why does a moral judgement require an emotional expression? Is it not possible to identify good and evil objectively?

Funny how no one can ever seem to prove these crimes or major moral transgressions. If the reason they are never proven is that they never happened then he is justified in claiming to be the target of a witch hunt. Given the intense scrutiny he now lives under and the annual IRS audits he has had for years given the complexity and large sums involved in his annual tax filings, it seems like a conspiracy theory to presume Trump is getting away with anything at all.

Context: WaPo Changes Al-Baghdadi Headline Several Times Amid 'Religious Scholar' Debacle WaPo changed their headline on this story 2 times. The first revision removed reference to him being a terrorist. The second revision removed his affiliation with religion. In the final headline Baghdadi was merely an "extremist leader" of ISIS. Yeah, let's not make hasty moral judgements. Or any judgements at all, apparently. But this stance is not sincere, it is merely adopted for the moment when Trump might have an unambiguously positive headline. Social justice and Trump resistance can't exist without moralizing judgment. The point of the post and the meme is that it does no favors for Muslims to describe a vicious terrorist as a scholar of Islam. It leads one to think "Why, if more Muslims actually did the reading assignment maybe they would be terrorists too!" This whole episode highlights yet another example of evading the real issue, Islamic terrorism. The policy of avoiding showing pictures or listing names of regular criminals as well as terrorists is more of the same evading. Institutions of media, government and academia have decided that some facts should not be noticed.

Washington Post being very subversive today with their headline announcing the ISIS leader's death.