Grames

I think there is more to "man qua man" than people who like to philosophize are willing to dive into.  There are certain rational shortcuts and superficial calculus' we like to throw at things like the trolley problem or the definition of a human (recall the story of the throwing of a plucked chicken to ridicule "featherless biped" as the definition of man).
 
IF man WERE cannibals, by nature, by flavor, by urge, by intuition, by evolution, culture, and institution, then what makes a person thrive should probably involve some cannibalism, as well as some virtues for avoiding being supper.  BUT our nature is NOT cannibalism.
Letting defenceless babies of our own nature, other individuals, other persons, other ends in themselves whose natural life includes parental or adult care, simply die for the want of it... when each and every one of us was provided... had to be provided with it ourselves... offends our very nature.  It is not simply emotional... nor outside the realm of rational... it is part of what makes  humans what we are.
No matter what kinds of rationalizations people bandy about to support dehumanization , or inhuman existence... they imagine we can be anything, but an anything is nothing in particular.
We have natures, and the order of nature is in us, we are human, and at the root ARE things like our our innate ability to respond and to care for children. 
So to be sane, to be healthy, flourishing humans... we are our children's keepers.  Parents first, family second, friends and local people, and the rest of us at large if only temporarily, until someone takes over.

Don't have sex with strangers.  Link sex and romance by reserving sex for romantically significant others.  Use contraception with planning and conscientiousness.  Don't rely on abortion as contraception.   These points are what pass for common sense among normal people.

Don't have sex with strangers.  Link sex and romance by reserving sex for romantically significant others.  Use contraception with planning and conscientiousness.  Don't rely on abortion as contraception.   These points are what pass for common sense among normal people.

Even between sexual partners in a committed relationship most sex does not result in pregnancy, so this is not plausible.  However a good heuristic for whether or not one should have sex with someone is if a pregnancy would be completely unacceptable then don't have the sex.  
 
I confess, I think sluts are hilarious.  Sluts and drunks (similar mentality) ought to be ridiculed at every opportunity.  Not just because ridicule can be entertaining but it can be persuasive to get people to change their behavior.

That was not what I said, merely that it would be reasonable and understandable if a state were to bar gay adoption for the protection of children.  I have since gained some finer grained knowledge of possibly the real problem: children with genetically unrelated male stepparents in the household have a many times greater risk of being abused or killed (not just the murdered but also those getting into danger due to less parental attention).  The phenomenon has been named the "Cinderella effect".
People have sex for all kinds of reasons, including poor reasons.  It is simply not the case that sex is always indicative of someone pursuing pleasure and love.
Did I make a list of preventatives?  No, and why should I when the topic is abortion and contraception had already failed or was absent?  Contraception is used by people of both sexes with some sense of responsibility and an extended time horizon in their thoughts, not the kind of anti-conceptual and range-of-the-moment mentality I was criticizing.
Perhaps you simply are not aware of potential scale of the problem.  Most abortions are due to this mentality in action.
 

Abortion would be a less controversial issue if few cared about it.  If only the 7.7% abortions with valid reasons took place there would a lot less people paying attention to the issue.
Of further interest on this sidebar is Gay Parenting: Promise and Pitfalls | Dave Rubin & Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
 

But rhetoric is essentially about persuading.
 

If you read the draft opinion you will see that the court's reversal on Roe and Casey is based on the legal grounds that those decisions were unsupported by law, precedent, or practice and that what legal history was covered in Roe was irrelevant or simply wrong.  The Supreme Court's assertion of judicial power to attempt to settle the abortion controversy by decree was unconstitutional because the Court has no such authority.  Mystical metaphysics has nothing to do with it.  No metaphysical hypotheses of any kind is offered.  

The disagreement is not massive, but the result (fully banning abortion or not) is.  The position of the full abortion ban proponent is merely the fallacious "argument of the beard" applied to the case of the incremental growth of the fetus.  The portion of all Americans in favor of a full abortion ban is less than 20%, so when they cannot be brought to moderate their position by reason they can be safely disregarded.  Most people that favor abortion restrictions are concerned with the second or third trimester, and even Rand allowed that arguments over the last trimester were to be taken seriously rather than dismissed out of hand.
What cannot be taken seriously is Rand's performance here while seemingly standing on one foot during a question and answer session.  
Rand first attacks William F. Buckley Jr. because he would "deny the right to abortion" without first establishing that abortion is a right.  Then she attacks the "gratuitous" nature of Buckley's denial, but an attack on the motive of an opponent is the ad hominem fallacy which has no bearing on the validity of the structure of an argument or the ultimate truth of the conclusion.  Then she constructs a theory of the motive of the anti-abortion Buckley and his ilk, that he "obviously" wants to enslave people like farm animals, which is the strawman fallacy.  Then she makes a rhetorical  pathos appeal to those poor Romeos and Juliets out there having sex and getting pregnant involuntarily as if they had no volitional control over themselves.  Then she makes the over generalization that in all such cases the pregnancy is a burden that prevents a budding career by the parents, as if the infant would have no value to the parents and would remain so (and with no budding career of its own in time).  It all adds up to nothing of philosophical significance, but it seems to have personal significance to her based on her vehemence.  It is nothing more than Rand's personal opinion and is not persuasive.

America, France and Britain are not vulnerable to an equivalent paranoia, but Germany, Poland and Romania and the small countries are equally paranoid about Russian encroachment as Russia is about encirclement.  Is one paranoia more important than the other?  Not in some impartial god's view sense, and NATO is not in the business of being impartial.
I think western intelligence agencies and the U.S. State Dept. should have let Putin have the Ukraine and not contested it for the last decade.   He's going to get it anyway because he is willing to fight for it and the west is not.

The idea of Russia joining NATO is either remarkably naïve or a gambit offered with an ulterior motive.  That Putin of all people could be naïve is not plausible.
The larger an alliance is the more unwieldy it becomes.  Too great of a diversity of interests causes the organization to only be able to respond to peripheral issues unimportant to all of them.  Russia in NATO would diplomatically neutralize that alliance in cases where Russia itself were to cause controversy, much as both Turkey and Greece being in NATO removes NATO from Greek-Turkish disputes.
Russia having been admitted to NATO ahead of all those unimportant little countries would mean Russia could veto their admission.  Russia could then act against them at its leisure and diplomatically prevent NATO from doing anything about it.
Russia could never be an equal partner in NATO without America accepting its demotion from de facto leader of the alliance.  America would gain nothing from accepting such a displacement but would risk the loss of the long peace in Europe.
It was alarmingly insightful and bold of Putin to understand all this twenty years ago and attempt to achieve by diplomacy the neutralization of NATO even when Russia was at its weakest economically and militarily.  
The economic integration of Russia with Europe has had some success.  But the Euro community is feeling rather betrayed right now and Russia's gas lines supplying Europe are being used as leverage against sanctions.
Its been a pleasure working through these thoughts even if you remain unconvinced.

It was correct, from the standpoint of her philosophy, for Rand to counter Kant’s notion that our minds cannot grasp things as they are apart from contributions from our minds. But there is a deeper criticism of Kant, based in Rand’s philosophy, that we should observe, one she never expressly stated: there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself in Kant’s most fundamental sense. From Rand’s metaphysics, fully grown, it is not only that Existence is identity and consciousness is identification. It is, additionally, that every existent has measures—they bear magnitude relations—and cognitions engage measurements, discernments of magnitude relations. “If anything were actually ‘immeasureable’, it would bear no relationships of any kind to the rest of the universe, it would not affect nor be affected by anything else in any manner whatever, it would enact no causes and bear no consequences—in short, it would not exist” (ITOE 39; Baumgarten §53– “whatever is entirely undetermined is nothing.” ). Then there is no such thing as Kant’s thing-in-itself. It is not only “as nothing to us,” it is nothing (and not because it would be as nothing to any kind of intelligence whatever, even an omniscient one, contra Rand’s thought in ITOE App. 194). With respect to relations, Rand’s dicta “Existence is identity” should be cashed as “No existents are without relations to other existents.” Among relations to things not itself would be possible real relations of any real thing to human consciousness. Kant’s distinction between things as perceivable or knowable and things in themselves is in reality a distinction between things as perceivable or knowable and things that do not exist. Inability to know things that do not exist is no shortcoming; said thing-in-itself is not something at which our perceptions and conceptions aim. Then too, it is not a thing-in-itself that brings us sensations; from nothing, nothing is supported or arises. Never “is the thing in itself . . . at issue in experience” (A30 B45) is so for the Kant-missed reason that there are no such things as things in themselves. However, although Kant was wrong to characterize things as they are independently of our discernment of them as things as they are “in themselves,” and we have exposed that misidentification of the two notions, it remains to complain against Kant that he should have the human mind, led by the senses, incapable of any discernment of things as they are apart from the human mind. 

Tony next you’ll say the American regime is acting in an authoritarian manner just because its officials arrest political opponents on bogus charges or broadcasts show trials 
https://www.theepochtimes.com/michigan-republican-gubernatorial-candidate-arrested-in-connection-to-jan-6-capitol-breach_4522911.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=whatfinger
Tune in tonight to see and help the regime identify and punish its enemies!
81 million people can’t be wrong , Joe’s legit everybody knows it , and it’s criminal to think otherwise !

AI "dictator" and rights coexisting.  "You will enjoy the utopia provided to you or die."  There are a thousand and one contradictions in this idea, I mentioned the first that occurred to me.

What makes Putin's forward defense strategy difficult for me to understand is that I can't imagine an invasion of Russia from any quarter.  No Napoleon or Hitler or Khan is going to come for them, especially in the modern urban era where populations are contracting.  With no plausible opponent the forward defense strategy is not moored to reality but still requires keeping non-Russian populations under the control of Russia or in other words an empire.  The imperial nature of the Russian strategy is why Putin is against nationalism, even Russian nationalism.  
Russia's defense strategy is to keep an empire, but Russia doesn't need an empire because they are not worth invading in the first place.

I should also add -- for those who harp on the issue that "Putin is not the legitimate leader of the Russian Republic" -- that not only (as posted earlier) is Zelensky not the legitimate leader of Ukraine, but Joe Biden is not the legitimate leader of the U.S., so the lend-lease arrangement recently made between the U.S. and Ukraine has no "moral legitimacy" either.
You really believe a guy who stayed in his basement during most of the campaign phase, and made a few public appearances in which a dozen or so people showed up, each one sitting compliantly with a face mask, and separated by one another by six feet, sitting in a chair with a circle drawn around it -- that he got 80 million votes? The most popular POTUS in history? Even more popular than Obama? When Trump would speak at rallies in various cities, each filled with capacity crowds, e.g., when he spoke in Butler, PA, there are almost 60,000 people who showed up. And yet Biden won in a "secure, fair, and honest election"? I don't think so.
Watch "2000 Mules".

>it's only FOX News
That's a mistake. FOX (as well as its conservative competitor, Newsmax) is controlled opposition: it's permitted by its sponsors to criticize certain things, but not to criticize -- or even mention -- other things.
Examples: a year ago, Newt Gingrich was a guest being interviewed by commentator Harris Faulkner. When Newt started to mention the funding by George Soros of local Attorneys General who were radical lefties, Faulkner cut him off and told him that "we're not going to talk about Soros..." At first Newt laughed, thinking this was some sort of joke, but then he realized that FOX was simply censoring his statements: he was not permitted to mention the name "George Soros". More recently, Catherine Engelbrecht, a founding member of True-the-Vote (investigating the fraud of the 2020 presidential election) was on Tucker Carlson's show. She was told by Carlson before the show not to mention Dinesh D'Souza's recent documentary on the fraud, titled "2000 Mules", which used cell-phone tracking data to track thousands of ballot-harvesters ("mules") who went back and forth to ballot drop-boxes in many states, and then picked up more ballots (with names of dead people on them, or names of out-of-state people), to drop them into the ballot drop boxes. The documentary also tracks them going to various NGO headquarters where they picked up the ballots and were paid per ballot. FOX and Newsmax have stated publicly that they will not air the documentary or even mention it. 
As stated earlier, both FOX and Newsmax receive millions of dollars in sponsorship from Big Pharma (mainly Pfizer, it appears) and thus will not honestly criticize the so-called "vaccines."
In that sense, FOX and Newsmax are no different from CNN and MSNBC. The only way to watch these venues "objectively" is to start from the assumption that they are presenting propaganda promoting someone's interests that are most likely not your interests.
Wake up.

I stopped reading when you claimed I get my news from CNN and MSNBC. I don't watch left-wing propaganda stations and when I watch a national news channel it's only FOX News, but, and this is very important, I watch it objectively, and have mostly stopped watching Tucker even though as I said earlier I like a lot of what he has to say over exactly this issue.

>which is objectively evil Russian aggression
As a response to objectively evil Ukrainian government aggression against other Ukrainians who are ethnically Russian. If you study some history of the subject instead of watching CNN and MSNBC you might learn something and arrive at a conclusion more consistent with the actual historical record.
This is known as the "correspondence theory truth," in which "truth = correspondence to fact"; as opposed to slavishly following MSM, which is known as the "coherence theory of truth," in which "truth = beliefs and statements that are not only internally consistent but concur, and are consistent with, stories and viewpoints espoused by pundits on MSM." As an example of the latter, when Brian Stelter on CNN went to one of the areas that were rioting after the George Floyd killing, and with a straight face told the cameras that "this is mainly a peaceful demonstration" when viewers could plainly see buildings burning in the background and people rioting violently in the streets, there were many viewers who, to this day, deny that there was any violent rioting in the streets because Brian Stelter -- Johnny-on-the-Spot -- told them what to think, and told them how to interpret what they were seeing. That's called "controlling the narrative."
It's like the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where the little terrier Toto pulls back the curtain, revealing a harmless old man at a machine that amplifies his voice, making him sound menacing, and who then shouts (as a last-ditch attempt to "control the narrative" of Dorothy and her companions), "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
>war crimes, and atrocities
False flags. For example, the maternity hospital that was shelled several weeks ago, with reports of dead women and babies, and blamed on Russian forces by western mainstream media, had been evacuated several weeks earlier in February and was being used as a headquarters by Ukrainian military and the Azov battalion. That's why it was shelled by Russian forces. But women and babies were not among the casualties.
The online newscast called "The Hill: Rising" hosted by Kim Iversen had a webcast at the end of February about some of the fake images and newscasts coming out of Ukraine and promoted by mainstream media, such as spectacular nighttime rocket attacks that were actually images from a video game; images of "brave" president Zelensky donning military gear, apparently "ready to appear on the front lines to support his troops" that were actually recycled pictures from a year ago of a training exercise; etc. See link.
The more recent hysteria by MSM over Russian forces "about to attack a nuclear power plant" was a false flag, too. Ukrainian military took over the power plant and fired on Russian forces hoping to goad them into returning the fire (they didn't). Nevertheless, sleepwalkers in the west who swallow Blue Pills handed out to them by MSM got to shake their heads and virtual-signal to one another, "I just saw on The View that those nasty, nasty Russians were about to attack a nuclear power plant! That Putin guy sure is nuts!" Etc. Controlling the narrative.
>that are clearly reminiscent of those of the 3rd Reich
That's for sure! The members of the Azov Battalion are the scions of WWII-era Nazis (can't even call them "neo-Nazis; they're actual, old-style Nazis, and they even don some of the runic symbolism on their military gear). So when Putin declared that one of the aims of the incursion would be to "de-Nazify" Ukraine, he was being literal.
The Objectivists on this board are simply uninformed. It's understandable, though. Ayn Rand hated Russia, so followers of Ayn Rand should also hate Russia. That seems to be about the extent of "research" most Objectivists here have done on the topic of Ukraine.
As for Tucker Carlson: he's a good interviewer and very likable. Many haven't forgiven him, though, for the insulting way he treated attorney Sidney Powell after the fraud of the 2020 election started to become known (see Dinesh D'Souza's recent documentary on that, titled "2000 Mules" showing video evidence of massive ballot-stuffing by Democrats). The problem isn't Tucker; the problem is that Fox is really part of MSM now (it was been for a long time), whose function within that space is being seen by many (including me) as being "Controlled Opposition", i.e., a venue that is permitted to voice opposition to some of the prevailing narratives but only within certain limits. This applies to Newsmax, as well. Both Fox and Newsmax have taken large sums of money from Big Pharma so you won't hear a peep from them regarding the poisonous effects of the mass vaccination and mass boosting programs, and both news venues have demurred on the January 6th "insurrection" at the Capitol, and the 2020 election fraud.
Regarding the vaccines: as Edward Dowd (former managing director at BlackRock) has said, there's been a 40% increase since the vax rollout in 2021 of "All Cause Mortality" in a demographic that shouldn't be having such an increase: working age adults between 18 and 64. This was first reported a few months ago by the CEO of OneAmerica, a large insurance company headquartered in Indiana. A 40% increase in All Cause Mortality is about 10 Standard Deviations on a Normal Distribution, indicating an event that one wouldn't expect to see even in 200 years. Other insurance carriers, both US and European, have noticed similar kinds of increases over the past year. There are probably several causes (the lockdowns, for sure) but the injurious effects of the mRNA technology on causing long-term damage to the immune system, as well as contributing to blood clots and myocarditis, has now been admitted even by Pfizer during its recent FOIA releases of its trial data. Dowd and others (MDs and PhDs) are expecting huge numbers in excess mortality -- in the many millions, possibly more -- to die in the next few years. Unfortunately, many of those will be children.
Alternative viewpoints that aren't censored or controlled can only be had on alternative platforms such as Rumble, BitChute, Telegram, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Truth Social (Trump's platform), Frank Speech (Mike Lindell's platform), and maybe a few others. Under Elon Musk's helmsmanship, Twitter might rebound as an actual mainstream platform promoting free speech, hence, alternative narratives, but we'll have to wait to see how that all plays out in the next few months.

I think the person in this thread complaining about O'ists getting too much info on this subject from the MSM has been getting too much of his own info (nonsensical conservative propaganda) from Tucker (who I like in many ways even though he's a lunatic about this subject which is objectively evil Russian aggression, war crimes, and atrocities that are clearly reminiscent of those of the 3rd Reich). This is WW3's (let's call it by what it actually is) of the shit the actual Nazis did during WW2.

Recommended: An interesting and informative (if long) livestream podcast by a filmmaker/writer named Gonzalo Lira, who lives in Ukraine. He covers most of the relevant facts regarding the oligarch Kolomoiski (living in Switzerland) who helped place a comedian and actor, Zelensky, in power, as well as paying him to finance the Nazi Azov Battalion. According to Lira (in hiding as of the time he recorded this podcast) all of the cabinet ministers were "selected" by Kolomoiski and then duly "appointed" by Zelensky. The ministers are all thugs (according to Lira), as are the members of the Azov Battalion. The atrocities highlighted by the western media (the maternity hospital, for example) are mainly examples of classic "False Flag" operations, committed by the Ukrainian army (including, of course, Azov) against Ukrainian citizens, and then blamed on Putin and the Russian army. 
Retired Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore, Gonzalo Lira, and other commentators whose links I've posted, are crystal clear on the reasons for the Russian incursion: Russia sees the expansion of NATO into Ukraine -- with the strong possibility of western (i.e., US) nukes stationed along its eastern border, just a few kilometers from Russia -- as an existential threat to its sovereignty, in exactly the same way and for the same reason, that the US under the JFK administration viewed Soviet nukes in Cuba -- just 90 miles away from the US -- as an existential threat to its own sovereignty. Lira posits hypothetically how the US would react if China, for example, formed military alliances with countries in South America, and then an otherwise neutral buffer-zone like Mexico were pressured to join such an alliance: would the US simply say, "Well, Mexico's a sovereign country so it therefore has the right to join any kind of alliance it pleases" or would it say, "such an alliance is ultimately controlled by China, and if Mexico ceases to be a neutral buffer between the US and the China/S.America alliance, we'll be seeing Chinese nukes on the northern border of Mexico, right next to Texas". I think the latter. And Lira, et al., are right when they aver that the US would view that as an existential threat to its own sovereignty and would probably take military action against Mexico...not to conquer territory but to keep Mexico "neutral", i.e., as a buffer between itself and the China/S.America alliance.
Same with Russia and Ukraine. Russia wants Ukraine neutral.
According to these sources, the outcome of this incursion is a foregone conclusion: the much larger, better equipped Russian army will win, especially since (as stated above) they view this issue as an "existential threat" and are willing to do whatever is necessary to keep Ukraine neutral AND to "de-Nazify" Ukraine by killing the Nazis...meaning killing the members of the Azov Battalion. The latter know this, of course, which (according to these sources) seems to be the main reason Zelensky/Kolomoiski/Azov are trying to keep the conflict going, as well as trying to coax other countries into the conflict -- especially the US -- in the hopes of starting a proxy war between the US and Russia, and in the hopes of extending the conflict long enough that they can continue surviving, probably by fleeing the country (just as Nazis in Germany did when they saw the war had turned against them).
It's important to counter the false narrative coming out of western mainstream media since the latter seem pretty much to be warmongers interested in getting the US involved in what would clearly be World War 3. To understand more on how and why US mainstream media all seems to be in lockstep with their narrative regarding Ukraine, look into the CIA's "Operation Mockingbird", as well as Obama's signing into law the right of the US government to promote propaganda to the public (he essentially reversed an earlier law that had forbidden the federal government from propagandizing to the public).
And THAT would be a perfect opportunity -- along with whatever new pandemics (or PLANdemics) the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, et al., have in store for us -- to impose the "Great Reset" on everyone. You can kiss goodbye any liberties you're now enjoying if that happens. For an example of what that could look like, see what's going on in the megacity of Shanghai, China.
 

*** Split from: Objectivists are working to save the world from tyranny--isn't that altruism? ***
>Just today I saw a news report that a gov't official in Russia had said that domestic opponents to Russia's current war in Ukraine will be sent to concentration camps.
What was the news source? Most of what mainstream media has presented to the public regarding Ukraine has been propaganda. Even many images have been shown to be hoaxes.

Ethnic Russians who speak Russian but live in Ukraine don't want to live under a Ukraine government run by a neo-Nazi gang (the Azov Battalion) with a puppet president (Zelensky). The Ukraine government has been shelling the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine since 2014 and thousands of those Ukrainians have been killed. Additionally, as Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, has confirmed in a recent videotaped Senate hearing, Ukraine has a number of bioweapons laboratories (she called them "research facilities") that we now know through documents released by the Pentagon, were and are, financed by the U.S. Apparently, Mr. Putin doesn't like the idea of U.S.-backed bio-weapons labs on his doorstep, especially given what is now know via leaked emails, etc., from Fauci, Daszak, Baric, et al., regarding gain-of-function research on viruses that began in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, University of N. Carolina, Fort Dietrich) and continued in Wuhan, China at their Institute of Virology. 

Can't understand why anyone would uncritically believe the narrative spun by mainstream media. 

The concept to be placed opposite is seeking correspondence in the appropriate ways as opposed to just having correspondence. I do think there is a concept of seeking correspondence (a long winded way of saying seeking truth) in inappropriate ways. An example might be phlogiston, a substance thought to be released during combustion. They early chemists really were trying to understand something, had various reasons for why they postulated this, and began to abandon the concept after it became clear that there was no such thing and the reasons were methodically bad.

Continuing to work things out, lets consider virtues.  From the Lexicon": 
“Value” is that which one acts to gain and keep, “virtue” is the action by which one gains and keeps it.
Galt’s Speech,
For the New Intellectual, 121
and then further:  
My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.
Galt’s Speech,
For the New Intellectual, 128
The virtues most directly founded in ethics and not requiring others as objects of the virtuous action are rationality, productiveness, and pride.  The other virtues are essentially political virtues.  Independence is not a virtue unless there is possibility of being dependent, which requires some other person.  Honesty is not a virtue unless there is a possibility of deception, which requires some other person to be deceived.  Justice is not a virtue unless there is possibility of being unjust to some other person.  Once one has learned dishonesty or unjustness they can be turned on oneself, but they must be first learned from others. 
Comments?
edit:  I forgot integrity.  Upon further consideration it seems redundant.  It seems to be a meta-virtue, a reminder to be virtuous.

Here's my take on it.  
The big open ended question of ethics is "What should one do?" Rand starts her talk/essay Philosophy: Who Needs It with a science fiction scenario of an astronaut crash landed on an unknown planet and show how the astronaut needs and in fact acts out some philosophy whatever he does or doesn't do.  She affirms elsewhere that one needs ethics stranded alone on a desert island.  Ethics is about "what should one do?".
To make progress toward a rational answer Rand creates some conceptual handles on the problem.  The question is about action, and action has objects and actors.  Only living things need to act.  Living things need to act to gain certain things to continue to live and act further.  She defines value as "that which one acts to gain or keep", with the "one" encompassing any single living organism not just people.  The objective basis of ethics is values.
Ethics is a necessity for people because of their conceptual faculty and volition, but not for plants or animals.  Ethical philosophy is essentially which values are chosen, what standard is used to choose them,  and how they are ordered and organized.
Politics isn't any different from ethics in its objects, by which I mean politics is still about values.  Values are still that which one acts to gain or keep, never a collective.  Politics differs from ethics in its method: more than one individual is acting toward the same value.  Values are still necessarily selfish/egoistic even when working with others to achieve them.  
The ethical standard of value, selection of values, hierarchy of values, in fact the entire code of values stays the same and doesn't change for politics.  There is no separate political code of values just a political means of obtaining them.
All human action comes within the scope of ethics because all action will have some result gained or kept.  Only action taken with others is within the scope of politics.  Politics is a subset of ethics in this way, and is also conceptually dependent upon ethics via the reuse of the concept of value.
"Acting with others" is sufficiently value-free to qualify as an objective basis to defining the scope of politics.  It encompasses everything from robbery, murder and slavery (the other need not be voluntarily cooperating, this is about your values not the other guy's) to family, trading, and voting.  This definition can apply to animals when they act together because the definition is about acting not philosophizing.  
Economics is "acting with others for material values".  Trading, robbery and slavery are within economics as well as politics and ethics.  
The basic political unit is coordinated action by two or more actors.