DavidOdden

It's fucking hilarious that you think I said anything even vaguely implying that any form of speech is illegal. You should learn to read more carefully.

Trump’s primary attack on the American way of conducting elections was a threat, not an realized act of war. Specifically, illegally declaring (selected parts) of the constitutionally-mandated election procedure (the counting of electoral votes) to be invalid. This did not happen, and I can’t say that it was more than a rumination. He was defeated at the polls and that should have been the end of it. It is not important that he did not actually force Pence to implement his plan, what matters is that he even considered it in the first place.

So to paraphrase your response, you personally have no evidence to support the claim, instead you believe a claim made by others. Which is pretty much the same basis that 99.99% of people on the planet have for the affirmative belief that covid exists: they have heard an “authoritative request”, they have no reason to deny the claim and some reason to accept the claim – an act of faith. Clearly, we have an epistemological crisis: contradictory positions, so how do we chose between rejecting vs. accepting the claim (that covid is real)? In reviewing some of the voluminous files provided on the web page, I concluded that the requests themselves were misconceived, in terms of what constitutes a record under 45 CFR Part 5, which starts by clarifying that The FOIA does not require us to perform research for you or to answer your questions. The FOIA does not require agencies to create new records or to perform analysis of existing records; for example, by extrapolating information from existing agency records, reformatting publicly available information, preparing new electronic programs or databases, or creating data through calculations of ratios, proportions, percentages, trends, frequency distributions, correlations, or comparisons. Ill-defined requests for “any information on this topic” are very likely to run into the 2 hour search limit. As a meta-test test of FOIA compliance, you might therefore request something more specific, such as information contained in the article “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies”. I don’t believe that this published article would be produced by a FOIA request, because scientific publication on a topic within the scope of what a federal agency “does” are not automatically records subject to disclosure. The regulation states that “Disclosure of the requested records must be meaningfully informative about government operations or activities. The disclosure of information that already is in the public domain, in either the same or a substantially identical form, would not be meaningfully informative if nothing new would be added to the public's understanding”. Discovery of some fact about covid in the above publication would not “shed light on the operations or activities of the government”, therefore would be outside the penumbra of FOIA. There are better tools for searching for scientific information. A FOIA request is about as appropriate as would be using a hammer to remove a screw.

Just to get clear on questions of evidence, what is your evidence that all 220 FOI agencies have responded with "no records found", and exactly what record was requested (i.e. your proof that the specific request was made)?

I got something about 16 months ago: mostly a persistent sore throat like strep (without the blotches). My wife was also feeling crappy, then she hollers down to me that she had covid, I took the test again and the test device showed lines. I infer that I had covid, but I don’t “know, with certainty” that I did. The main question, then, was “what should I do?”. I decided to take the benevolent path and not risk transmitting it to others for the requisite time, and just waited to get over it. The alternative would be to assume that I don’t have any bio-disease, so maybe I would go shopping or partying, or something. In other words, when you don’t know “for absolute positive certain” what the correct conclusion is, you have to carefully weigh risks and the quality of knowledge that you have. My direct knowledge was pretty minimal, everything that I know about covid is second to third hand (I don’t classify “common knowledge” as “knowledge”, and gen-pop health services announcements are also not “knowledge”, they are social-management strategies). Mask facts and distancing facts were prime examples of ideologically-engineered conclusion which had a mild relation to scientific fact. The 6’ figure was derived from standards applied to doctors, a number for reducing chances of getting whatever the patient was emitting (20’ closer to the Truly Safe distance, also completely impractical for ordinary human interaction). I decided to read a couple of serious (paywall) articles when the plague first happened, and like everything else in medicine (and science in general), I found multiple tiers of information. Popular media and politicians rely on the lowest level of pseudo-information, the executive summary. This is strictly a series of conclusions and recommendations, and no evidence – the existence of evidence is implied. You can either accept or reject the popular statements, but to do so on a reasoned basis, you have to work hard, ultimately you have to engage the peer-reviewed scientific literature. This goes for covid, lipids, pollution, global warming, species endangerment, homelessness, and every other hot-button political issue. I just don’t have the bandwidth: I’m gonna do what makes sense for me, knowing that death is always possible and fearful death-avoidance isn’t living. Others may prefer to prolong their process of dying, in the mistaken belief that living is “not being dead yet”. Anyhow, I assume your grandfather had something, which the professionals decided was “covid”, and it isn’t important whether covid is “one thing” or “a class of things”. In terms of declaring what they (the CDC mouthpieces) should have said or done, the one thing that I would fault them for is the huge missed opportunity to elevate the population’s understanding of science. They could have focused more on evidence and logic, rather than the resulting conclusions. The main reason why they did not was that suggestion any possibility of doubt would encourage irrational rejection of conclusions that were not absolutely, definitively and with certitude proven beyond imaginable doubt. Some aspects of this thread are ridiculous, mainly the implied conspiracy theory that nothing actually happened, it was like the staged landings on the moon. Sweeping aside the innuendos and nit-pickings at the lower margins of the science, there are only two important questions. First, was there a disease (or class of…) – can we rationally be Holocaust-deniers about the event? I say no, it happened, details of the disease are of lesser importance. The second question is what the government should have done, and that is pretty obvious at least here: nothing. The function of government is not disease control. But we have been saying this for decades, covid presents nothing new, and IMO losing serious ground in that struggle for hearts and minds. It is up to the person who cares to find the evidence that objectively (in)validates their conclusions. It would have been nice if the CDC had packaged the science better, but there shouldn’t be an official governmental voice of science in the first place, so applying a “should” to a “shouldn’t” requires you to embrace a contradiction.

Genetics does not immunize against racism, which is an ideology that is chosen for any number of bad reasons, even self-hatred. The real question is whether a person is properly deemed racist for holding an ideology that some ethnic group is intrinsically inferior or superior. The real answer to that is “of course, that is what it means to be racist”. Unqualified plural nouns can be interpreted in many ways, so a statement like “the Indians did not recognize property rights and where essentially constant nomads” might mean “all Indians” (just as “dogs are mammals” means that all dogs are mammals), or “most Indians”, “many Indians” or “more than 1 Indian”. In light of that fact, it is an error to speak vaguely, the part that is not clear to me is whether you mean “most Indians”, or “many Indians”. The other part of the racist canard is whether a person believes that an alleged inferiority / superiority is due to genetics, versus culture. It is not at all hard to dismiss the genetics-based stance, but it has also become socially unacceptable to embrace anything that smacks of cultural evaluation, however there are exceptions carved out where it is acceptable to criticize a person for “white-savior” or “male dominance” behavior (usually based not on the behavior itself, but on the bases of the fact that the person is white or male, or has a philosophy). In evaluating Rand’s beliefs about Indians, based on paltry documentary evidence, we have to look to see what is the most likely interpretation reflecting her actual intent. She does refer to generic unqualified “American Indians”. She says that she believes the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayals of Indians, without also stating her beliefs on the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of whites, which I also believe. Her understanding of Indians is based on a portion of Indian life in the US, that of the Plains Indians, which was indeed nomadic, a lifestyle where one’s means of survival depend on non-systematic rights to land plus corporate ownership of land, not individual ownership. This is even true of contemoorary white mammal-herders. It is wholly inaccurate as a representation of even the majority of Indians (counting individuals) but it is true w.r.t. the majority of territory in the US. Even now, most of the US is made up of under-populated minimally-settled land in the middle. I live in one of those states where the majority of land is not owned by individuals, it is held by “the tribal chief”, to be administered “for the benefit of the tribe”. I find post-hoc historical criticism to be supremely annoying because it is typically carried out in a factual and philosophical vacuum. The historical brutality of the Catholic Church to my historical peoples can or cannot be excused because they were taming a group of irrational savages, by teaching them different forms of irrational savagery. The irrational savages some of whom settled America gave way to an increase in rational men who build cities and industries, though there are still way too many people who are not on board with the program of living rationally. Historical analysis is completely pointless and irrelevant to anything, other than the academic discipline of “historical criticism”. The use of force is still not under the control of objective law – that is a goal to which we aspire, not a state of grace that we have reached. What we have now is better than what we had then, and this is a general truth about human progress. The valid criticism that can be leveled against people in the past is not that they were irrational, it is that they were ignorant. If you didn’t know that fact before this moment, I would not criticize you for being irrational, but a man who has had the truth explained to him and still rejects that truth without valid reason to do so, that man is irrational.

What she actually said is reproduced in Ayn Rand Answers (ed. by Robert Mayhew), pp. 102-104.

I guess I would not deny that such a perspective exists, but it is confused (maybe just “average confused”, not “hopelessly confused”). If you want tasty bacon, it (the experience) is a value to you. Perhaps it is the worst food for you for some reason, so you gotta give us some rational hook here. I’ll make something up: tasty bacon triggers an uncontrollable 2 lb. 5,000 calorie feeding frenzy, which may have negative health effects, thus bacon is also a disvalue (unless you value death). We have two values, and they both are slotted in the hierarchy according to a single goal, living qua man. The things under discussion – the experience of bacon, remaining physically healthy – just is. It’s when you use some logic to integrate these abstracted facts into a system of choices that value becomes by definition “moral”, a code for guiding choices of action. The thing that you value is not the moral rule derived by some logical process, the value is either the experience of bacon or the benefits of abstaining from bacon. “Eat bacon no more than once every two weeks” is a moral rule, derivable from a hierarchy of values, “Eat bacon whenever you desire” is a different rule, not rationally derivable from the facts that gave you the preceding moral rule. The idea of “hierarchy” seems to be too confusing for most people to handle, especially when speaking of rules like “Stay healthy” or “Enjoy life”. Instead, (too) many people devise absolute rules like “never eat bacon”, as though there is an equivalence between bacon and plutonium (I have an absolute rule against eating plutonium, the ultimate death metal). In some cases, a thing can be abused to the point that it contradicts the reasoning that justifies placing it in a certain position in your cognitive hierarchy. The pure selfish-utilitarian theory of value has a particular central purpose in life: slab-avoidance, which is a mis-identification. The eudaimonist theory of value posits a different purpose: living, as an active process. There is a third more widespread view that I have ignored, the cult-of-death theory that says that you should not exist but you must exist until you inevitably die as a sacrificial animal.

The value of a table is not part of its identity. The properties of an existent define its identity, and a property is a fact of the existent that explains what it does. A table can be made of metal or of wood, it can be red or white (you can add other properties of tables, and consider the relationship between what the thing does and that property). You can even reduce high level properties (like “red”) to more elementary, indirectly discernable properties (insert list of molecules and textbook information about light). The act of valuing (by a particular individual) as a property of that individual is likewise reducible to a complex fact, viz. an existing hierarchy of values and knowledge of self and the world around you that an individual has. I don’t value that brick-red metal table compared to this amberish wooden table for various functional and aesthetic reasons, whereas my brother values the red metal table more (we don’t need to inquire deeply into why we have different interests, but he needs tables that won’t catch fire). My valuing is not subjective, it is objective and well thought out, but it isn’t universal to all humans because not all humans live my life and have my nature. I hereby challenge the distinction between objective and subjective value as useless therefore invalid, instead I would distinguish rational and irrational value systems or applications of systems to facts. One value held by many people is “accumulation of wealth”, another is “expansion of knowledge”. In the world that actually exists, these and other values are independent values. One might value money more than knowledge, or the opposite, and from that difference could follow a career difference. Galt was not irrational in taking a low-paying janitorial job, given the disvalue of the alternative. You can reason to the hierarchy “money over knowledge”, or to the hierarchy “knowledge over money”, in fact to some extent you must reason to one of these when evaluating job options. With my knowledge of my own nature, I end up reasoning to one ranking, which is rational (the product of non-contradictory identification). Perhaps you can expand my knowledge and show me that the opposite ranking is actually better suited to my nature, but that hasn’t been done. “Market value” is useful only as a crude predictor of the future, it has little relation to an actual cognitive object, a hierarchy of values. It is at best a standard by which you can compare your cognitive system to that of a large selection of society. The seller might want to unload the devalued item quickly, or they may want more money and can wait for a customer who is willing to pay more (different seller demands). The customer might want to spend less money, or they might have a strong desire for the particular item or an immediate need for an item of that type (different buyer demands). If you and I know each other’s respective values and other relevant circumstances, we can probably arrive at a price, aided with the law of supply and demand. Most sales are conducted in a knowledge vacuum, and you can only know “average price”, not a value system. “Subjective value” is distinguished under the law from “market value” because the legal system needs a definite way to address knowledge lacunae, i.e. the situation where a person is held liable for damage to another person’s property and the other person declared that the goldfish is worth $10,000,000 to him. Market value is also useful in setting the price attached to an offer, especially in real estate, so that you know whether the house will stay on the market unloved for years. Price is not the same as value, but it is a result of different value hierarchies, especially the difference between the value system of the seller and the value system of the buyer.

It is true that the roots of Objectivism can be traced back some three thousand years (not ten), but the soil that it is rooted in is found in Greece. Western philosophy has been influenced by numerous Asian streams, however Aristotle cannot be said to have been influenced by Christianity or Judaism. Centuries later, the Romans welded Plato and Jesus together to create a still-living hydra monster, but we cannot generalize these secondary developments as “Western philosophy” thereby tainting Objectivism with improper Christian underpinnings. It is also true that Objectivism has a normative trend – there are “rules”. Rules are not a recent invention, indeed they substantially predate the evolution of humans, or mammals. Obviously rules in the sense of explicit moral codes are the exclusive property of humans because only humans have language, the tool for encoding explicit moral codes, and we may presume that such rules have been around for over 100,000 years. Mostly they would have been in the form “Give me your stuff or I’ll kill you”, or “Touch my stuff and I’ll kill you”. The dominant putative authority for moral rules across the globe has been the supernatural, except that the ancient Greeks sought to devise moral rules deriving from nature (as did the Cārvāka of India, who vanished), and this is the essence of Aristotilean and Objectivist ethics. If Objectivism were a synthesis of 10 millenia of world philosophy, it would be incoherent as Christianity is, especially in its modern instantiations. It is very clear from the historical record that Rand eliminates millenia of prior “synthesis” to find the Aristolilean core, then developed and perfected it into Objectivism. Identifying that philosophical root is what makes Objectivism radical. I don’t deny that in the 60’s the leftist movement redefined the meaning of “radical”, but I also don’t care. The reason why we should not just look at outcomes is because inspection of outcomes is vastly inferior to an understanding of actual causation. We now have rampant outcome-based systems of pseudo-knowledge on our computers that threaten civilization because they are based in a neo-religious interest in superficial behavior (outcomes) rather than what causes behavior. Outcomes are just the raw data that we call on to understand causation. It is meaningful to ask what are the principles that define Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. We can even ask what distinguishes Calvinism from AME-ism. The fact that there is a difference between AME-ism and Syrian Orthodoxy does not invalidate the unity of Christianity as a body of religious principles. Even within a single church (literally, a building not an institution) individuals can disagree. Because man’s behavior of chosen and man is free to choose between alternatives, we face a real quandry in characterising any philosophy or other kind of volutional behavior by humans. The integrationist viewpoint looks for the underlying principles that guide men’s choices, the disintegrationist viewpoint emphasises the diversity of behaviors. In order to judge a culture, you have to first identify the culture, meaning that you have to know what its causal principles are, and what essential properties distinguish it from other cultures. It is not an essential property of Christianity that Shabbos is on Sunday, even though that is a property distinguishing SDA from other Christian sects. That is one sense in which Christianity “speaks with many voices”, and we can multiply Protestant disunity by noting many other non-essential differences such as abstinence from alcohol, abjuring homosexuality, belief in credobaptism, doctrines regarding sin, the essentiality of sacraments etc. The question should not be whether you can find differences between individuals, the question should be whether a particular concept is valid in the first place, and if so, what are its defining features. I am lightly skeptical about the validity of the concept “modern Judeo-Christian culture”, as opposed to “Jewish culture” and “Christian culture”. Rather than defining the unity in terms of religion, I would define that unity based on geography: western civilization. As it happens, Christianity spread along with other aspects of western civilization, and the Judeo-prefix is a recognition that western culture is not exclusively Christian in religion. I would prefer the label “Religious western culture”, which is distinct from “atheist western culture”, but still similar in being “western culture”. Then any reference to “modern Judeo-Christian culture” simply directs our attention to the religious aspects of western culture. By inspection of the texts and behavior, we can identity a certain “Judeo-Christian” unity, even thought here there are measurable differences that should be omitted. If there are professed (purported) Christians who act selfishly, you should not ask whether they believe in some part of the Bible that seems to teach selfishness, you should ask whether they simply reject the principles of their nominal religion without embracing that rejection. Crossing the line from agnosticism to atheism is extremely difficult, and I believe that many so-called Christians are only social Christians, who are unwilling to openly declare their atheism.

Is "information" different from "fact" (esp. as Objectivism uses it)?

Nor can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it. A baby can't give birth to anything, but it may have the potential to do so, whereas programs and light bulbs don't have the capacity for self-generated action.

Your question about what consciousness is, is apt insofar as Objectivism deals with human consciousness and not the cognitive state of octopuses. Tiny creatures like bacteria, placozoans, jellyfish and tardigrades have some kind of biomechanical system for responding to external events (rocks and plants also respond to external events). While we generally hold that a brain is a minimum requirement for consciousness, that does sort of beg the question of whether a computer program can be conscious in the broader sense. The details of how humans developed faculties of sensory perception, memory, and abstraction are technical scientific matters, not philosophical questions, but one can still apply philosophical principles to learn something about this domain. Abstraction logically depends on sensory perception – you cannot “abstract” if you cannot perceive. You cannot perceive if you cannot sense. Therefore the fundamental question (a scientific one) is, exactly how did ‘sensing’ evolve? A simple albeit conjectural answer is that some mutation enhanced a physical reaction which gave the bearers of that mutation a better chance of escaping danger. The ones without the mutation just died or turned into ferns. Note that “mutation” presupposes a mechanism like DNA / RNA that makes “life” possible. What primarily stops an AI from developing consciousness in any sense is the same thing that stops a light from turning itself on. The apt question, IMO, is “can we craft an AI that is conscious?”, in some sense. An AI can’t do anything on its own. Can we take a pile of non-living materials and make it actually be alive? We have at least crafted crude sensory and memory systems that resemble the behavior of living beings. The main technical impediment to AI development is that the Supreme Beings designing them are utterly misguided by the Turing Test (although they know that the test has been debunked so they have dialed back their claims, without improving what they do).

As a starting point, data and information do not exist in a universe without a consciousnesses. Data is created by a consciousness. Data is a representation of a fact, a fact grasped (for example as a proposition) becomes data. Data is valid or invalid, depending no whether it was created correctly. For example, if I say “lag”, you may erroneously state that I said “lack” because you didn’t hear me correctly, then “lack” would be invalid as data (regarding what I said). What I actually said is the underlying fact (it is an aspect of reality, and can be conceptually grasped). An artifact which has been buried for 5,000 years is not a datum until it is uncovered and put in relation to some proposition. I was wondering whether the underlying issue here is a reification of epistemology, in conflating “fact” with “data” or “information”. Everything has the potential to be grasped by a consciousness so might become data, but mental processing is necessary for there to be data.

Are existents distinguished for those that “are physical” vs. “are not physical”? For example, is the number “3” physical, is the concept “dog” physical, is that specific dog that I’m pointing at physical? If “physical” has any meaning, it clearly must be true of the dog that I am pointing at. Is “physical” distinct from “mental”: if so, are there things that are mental but not physical? Every existent can be reduced to many physical facts, does that render all existents physical? Where exactly is the physical dogness in a dog?

Beats me, mostly. However, the conclusion that knowledge relies solely on the existence of a metaphysical entity fundamentally contradicts doctrines of any version of Christianity (also Judaism and Islam). If it were true, it would mean that God directly implants knowledge into our minds, and we do not have a choice to learn or not learn. Rather than relying on faith in his existence, God would simply implant certainty of his existence in the mind. Since knowledge is a relationship between a consciousness and reality, you could however declare that if God had not created reality and various consciousnesses, there would be no consciousness which would perceive and therefore know anything, so perhaps you could say that the existents presupposed in the concept “knowledge” (i.e. “consciousness, existence”) themselves presuppose a divine being. At this point you probably end up in a regress of arbitrary and fundamentally irrational assertions about why a divine being is a “necessary” condition for existence. Anyhow, I think you would get better-informed responses by probing the question at a Christian philosophical website (like Christianity Stackexchange).

As I see it, the most important point made in Objectivism is the “primacy of existence”. Nature is and does what it does, regardless of your beliefs about Nature. But you can use your consciousness to understand Nature. The “primacy” part means that your consciousness should conform to reality, and simply wishing doesn’t make it so. “Bare” Nature is malleable. Houses don’t just appear because of the invisible hand of Nature, a consciousness has to choose particular actions that bring houses into existence. Snakes and dogs are incapable of that kind of technology – why can’t they build? They lack the knowledge tools. A central contribution of Objectivism is an understanding of “knowledge”, and how it is that we get from observed facts to choices. We can observe properties of trees, and properties of rocks, and integrate that knowledge reaching the conclusion that we can create lumber. More observation and integration leads us to the conclusion that we can (and knowledge how) build houses. Other observations and integration lead to a moral code whereby we should build houses (in order to survive). In short, Objectivism puts consciousness and existence in the right order.

I am super-shocked that an Objectivist would interpret “Do you want to take out the trash?” as an order, wrapped up as indirect fake-politeness and then asserting without evidence that this “comes across as belittling”. The proposed alternative is to state your request directly, because people don’t like to feel manipulated, and yet the alternative given is the even-worse highly manipulative pseudo-request “Will you do me a favor?”. For the record, that is literally a request for information (a prediction about the future), but without saying what that favor is, you are making an altruistic claim against the addressee’s life. If in fact your purpose is to command a person to take out the trash, as initially asserted above, the most two direct ways to do that are to say “Take out the trash!” or even better, “I command you to take out the trash”. We can temporarily leave aside the question of comparative rudeness. The blank-check manipulation strategy behind the loathesome utterance “Will you do me a favor?” is not a request for information (compare that to “Will the bus arrive on time?”, where you have some reason to believe that your interlocutor can predict arrival time). It is a demand for a promise – without the courtesy of saying what you are promising, or why you would promise it. A less manipulative, direct approach is to state a fact, such as “I want you to take out the trash” (who cares what you want?), “It would be to your advantage if you took out the trash” (I’m waiting for the details…), “If you want sex, you better take out the trash” (at least now you know what’s at stake), or the objectively preferable “If and only if you take out the trash, I will have sex with you” (though submit that contract to a lawyer if you can’t find the loopholes). Everytime some pundit makes an ignorant claim about proper use of language and what words “really” mean, I have to fight the temptation to make a witty or sarcastic reply, and I always lose the fight. It is very rude to make uninformed claims about language, and yet people do it all the time. I think that the reason is that “rude” is an emotional response, not a rational one. It’s clearly a negative reaction, it implies that the perpetrator lacks basic knowledge of social norms, and is only used when the evaluator feels (yes, feels) that those norms are so self-evidently true that it is impossible to rationally explain what is morally wrong with the action. Appeal to how things “come across” is a bullet-proof proof that an action is rude: it is bullet-proof because it is a statement about the speaker’s subjective emotional reaction, which cannot politely be disputed. In aid of getting the trash taken out, what would be a morally-proper egoistic action? Very simply, take out the trash, don’t pass the buck to some other person. If taking the trash out is of high value to you, you will take out the trash. If it is a high value to Smith to take out the trash himself, Smith will take out the trash without any prompting. Since Thanksgiving just happened, we might reflect on social interactions from last Thursday. How do you acquire more turkey when it is 12 feet away from you? We could make a list of verbal and non-verbal means of achieving that end, and then we could also pair with each means a rudeness-evaluation, where (for example) interrupting a conversation to say “Pass the turkey” is rule, and saying “Please pass the turkey” is ruder because it introduces a level of uncertainty in the request (what should I do if it doesn’t please me to pass the turkey?). BTW getting up and taking the turkey is also rude, I leave that as an exercise to the reader. This is just a smattering of the massive set of reasons why I wish people would dismount their high horses over social conventions of language use.

You are correct that Objectivists do present Objectivism as being “radical” in some sense (in fact: it means "root" at least in Rand's usage) , but that is a contingent truth, not a defining property. In a cultural context where most people adhere to Objectivist principles, we would drop that characterization. As a rhetorical device for summarizing our stance in relation to others, the term “radical” is more appropriate than “conservative”, “traditionalist”, or “liberal”. I am not personally invested in defending the sound-bite use of the term “radical”. It is true and accurate to say that Objectivism does not support a wide range of popular beliefs and practices, and perhaps we could talk about what those “counter-cultural” beliefs are. The system is radically different from all other previous systems, although individual statements with which we agree and have even adopted can be found historically over the past 2,000 years or so (extending this back 10,000 years is too much of a stretch, or too little, since humans learned how to make fire much further in the past, and learned how to hunt even before we were humans). That is, the system is more than just the individual parts, it is the logical relations between the parts. The system has been sorely lacking, historically. We don’t have long lists of rules, because we have a system, whereas the Amish (perhaps) have long lists and no system. The principle of “simplicity” is belied by the fact that they have clothing styles that are 400 or so years old – not 10,000 – that they use domesticated animals, metal chisels. The most productive way that I know of to understand the practical application of Objectivism is to focus on a comparison of why you act the way you do, and how that differs from how other people act. The actual behavior may be same for Objectivists and non-Objectivists, but the chain of reasoning that leads to a choice will differ. Objectivist reasoning is not rooted in “the greater good”, whereas most people reduce their choices to some kind of social benefit.

I suppose first there has to be a “rule”. In my culture (the US), very few people use hanh phi in cooking and they don’t eat ugali, but that isn’t a “rule”, it’s a cultural accident that it isn’t a commonly-known option. It’s not really a “cultural rule” that people don’t have a Ph D or that you aren’t an accountant. There are cultural prohibitions against incest, theft, loud noises in the middle of the night. public nudity, using the N word, and so on. Any legal prohibition is a cultural rule against doing that thing. One other thing: norms for children are not the same as norms for adults, so we ought to limit the context to adult behavior. It is a cultural rule that a man stands up when a lady enters the room, however the vast majority of (male) adults do not follow this rule. Now, I’m old enough that I am aware of this rule, but I suspect that this rule was quietly repealed by the cultural legislators in the early 70’s. So it’s not entirely clear that there is any such a rule, and maybe we should say that it is a former rule. There is a new cultural rule of language that every adjective must be preceded by the adverb “super”. I refuse to abide by that rule. I know a number of people who don’t abide by that rule, but I don’t know if they are aware that there is this rule – in a few cases, I know that they are aware and they refuse, for the majority, they may be unaware that this is a rule. There is also a cultural rule regarding copying intellectual property without the permission of the owner. A considerable percentage of those who violate this rule do so willfully i.e. they refuse to follow the rule, but an even bigger percentage don’t follow the rule because they misunderstand the rule (usually thinking it only applies to copying for profit but not copying for personal use or the use of friends and family). In short, there are zillions of rules that most people don’t follow, mostly because they don’t know that there is such a rule, or believe that the rule has been repealed.

I want to butt in with a distracting point that may seem irrelevant but I argue is a central issue. The ancient Greeks did not have the idea “all animals are mortal”, as I understand it, the expansion beyond singular terms originates from William of Ockham. More to the point, the ancient Greeks did not have ideas about animals and mortal, but they did have concepts and perhaps ideas about θήρ and βροτός. Specifying the referents for these words is way above my pay-grade. The nit that I am picking is that one must first inspect the referents as a unit, and see what label (word) is assigned to that unit. Discussion of concepts in Ancient Greek have to focus on facts of Ancient Greek and ancient Greeks. As I understand it, the above terms more closely translate to English as “wild beast” and “mortal man”. All concepts are specific to a language, but the potential to create extensionally-identical units with some label is universal, Let’s then ask whether concepts have changed in the context of English, but taking other terms like “press” or “arms”. The latter two figure in the US Constitution in the First and Second Amendments. When the document was written, newspapers were literally printed on presses (originally designed for pressing wine), and “arms” were all single-shot muzzle-loaded metal tubes. The concepts “press” and “arms” are not limited to the extant technology of the time, they refer more abstractly to the practice of disseminating “expressions”, and to weapons. Meaning is concepts and propositions, not a list of concrete instances – meaning is intensional, not extensional. Thus the meaning of these concepts has not changed at all. There are cases where something other than technology or knowledge changes, for example “sick” has gained a new, positive meaning (at least for the time), and in British English, “boot” has been metaphorically extended first to mean “where you step to get into a coach” then “lower luggage compartment”, now “trunk”. I have deluded myself into thinking that I have a tolerable understanding of the concept “concept” and “proposition”, and I also know what a “sentence” is. I know the history of the word idea but I can’t say very exactly what an idea is (what distinguishes it from a proposition). I would be strongly inclined to say that a proposition is a specific type of sentence, except that propositions generally have to be paired with additional information that overcomes the vagueness of natural language (for instance, “He said that Stephen spoke” does not say who “he” is except it cannot be “Stephen”). In one knowledge context “he” would mean “David”, and in another context it would mean “Fred”. It would be correct to say that a proposition is a pairing of a sentence a context. It is also advantageous to promote language, not just because of my professional interest in it but because sentences can be objectively inspected and are not abstract and unjustified constructs like Cartesian mental images projected onto our brains. This is what the technical concept “semantic interpretation” refers to. A well-meaninged declaration that “He likes mammals, like lions and penguins”, it not and does not convert into a contextual truth when you discover that the person has a false belief that penguins are mammals. The declaration “He likes mammals, like lions”, is also not rendered contextually false because you can imagine there is some person whose pronoun is “he” yet who have most mammal species. Truth has to be about an objectively correct grasp of reality, unless we resign ourselves to saying that objectively false beliefs make false statements “contextually true”. I do not have a solution to the problem of distinguishing false beliefs, redefinitions of concepts, and “pronominal” terms like “I, that…”, but I would say that admitting false beliefs as contextually true solvent that creates truth from falsehood is not a good solution.

Good job sleuthing! He either wrongly attributes this to Rand, or, he "really meant" that some part of what he said could be related to something that she said. "The pursuit of Truth is not important," (Truth as a floating abstraction, an intrinsic good), "the pursuit of that truth is important which helps you in reaching your goal, provided you know what your goal is". She does not actually say this directly anywhere in her writings, but it is a reasonable characterization of her view of the value of truth in art.

Copyright protection is a result of laws that embody property rights. They are conceptually more difficult than the laws prohibiting you from stealing my car, or even temporarily taking it. It is actually against the law (it is a crime) to take my car temporarily without my permission, but it is not a crime to take my pen temporarily without my permission (the distinction is that theft requires an intent to permanently deprive you of your property, but vehicular theft is a special crime defined simply as “taking without permission”). You are free to hate existing theft laws and to lobby for a legislative change that drops the “intent to deprive” requirement. Copyright law is the product of national legislation in every country that has copyright (most do). Title 17 of the US Code embodies US copyright law, which is the foundation of copyright protection for Rand’s works (a right inherited by Peikoff). Names are not protected by copyright law. Copyright protection only recognizes original creations, which means that the author had to actually create the particular expression, but the name John Galt was demonstrably created over 100 years before AS, quite probably a number of times before that. I am constantly annoyed when people misuse my copyrighted works (not by illegal copying, simply by misinterpreting), but it is supremely low-level annoyance. We can legitimately ask whether Rand (not Peikoff) would be annoyed at some misuse of her writings, indeed we can also ask whether I would be annoyed at misunderstanding of Rand’s work. I don’t see the value in speculating about the emotional states of others, but I do see the value in discussing objective moral principles.

I think it is analogous to NVA and the VC during the Vietnam war. Syria supports Hamas, and probably will do so materially. I expect that any Israeli attack on Syria will be in light of a substantial threat of an actual attack by Syria, rather than general philosophical "friend of my enemy" reasoning. If Iran joins the attack then we can conclude that this is a move to obliterate Israel, if Saudia Arabia recognizes Israel and sends troop to aid Israeli (one can fantasize...), that would indicate something totally different. An intermediate possibility is that Syria will decide to let Hamas handle it on their own, and if there is evidence for that decision, I expect Israel would not attack Syria.

The two main questions that I have are (1) whether there is a significant increase in violent crime in parts of Chicago and, if so (2) what is the immediate cause? There are numerous imaginable answers such as citizen non-cooperation; de-policing at the level of individual officers, precincts or even the entire city; insufficient personnel or inappropriately-distributed personnel. Increasing personnel is not the solution is the cause is citizen antagonism or de-policing, and “education programs” are inutile if the problem is under-staffing. Which is why I’d want to know more about the nature of the problem.