DavidOdden

The problem with her statement is that they are logically unrelated to the ultimate claim about what the government should do. The only facts reported by her are assertions of her emotions – what she wants or thinks should be the case. You cannot respond to emotional claims, unless you make an absurd statement like “No, you do not want that; no, you do not feel that way”. I don’t care if you want a new local burger join to live or die based on its product and service, I don’t want you to make arguments based on forcing others to comply with your wishes. If you cannot get her to advance an actual argument rather than a report of emotion, then this simply isn’t a logical discussion. This is endemic in our culture, and it is why Trump got elected despite all the rational arguments against him as president – it came down to raw feelings and not facts and logic.
As for the claim that Google engages in fraud, that is utterly laughable. To even get to first base on that claim, you have to establish that there is some false claim which induced people to enter into a contract with the company that they would not have otherwise entered in. Google is a free service, which you do not pay for. They have made no promise to you. It is fraud to call Google’s practices fraud (by that misunderstanding both of Google’s practices and of fraud). Where is the promise about search results? This is a cousin to the socialist concept of “network neutrality” which is based on the miscreant notion that Google is a public service, not a private money-making business. I go to the local Kroger store and I see tons of “fraud” in the form of promotions for Kroger goods, but no promotions for the goods of a competitor. I read the local paper and I see only the ads of companies who pay to have ads placed, not those of companies who didn’t pay. I look at OO, which stands for Objectivism Online and I see the opposite of Objectivism, I see fraudulent representation of socialism, progressivism and statist being passed off as Objectivism – pure fraud. The government should do something to clean up this mess.

An example of a company actually suppressing another company is when AT&T enjoyed a statutory monopoly over phone services and therefore smaller companies could not even exist. A current one is interstate passenger rail and letter-delivery. Likewise water, gas, electricity, internet service and other so-called “natural monopolies”, depending on your location.
Google does not “suppress” Yahoo search, it is just more widely chosen by users. It is the customers who are “suppressing” Yahoo, by being allowed to freely choose according to their individual interests. Similarly, in the marketplace of politics, the Demopublicans do not “suppress” the Libertarians, they are simply more successful in selling their product. Why do we tolerate consumer preference, if the goal is to make all product be “equal” with respect to market share? The government could, instead, ration access to goods and services in such a way that all businesses have an identical market share, and this is enforced by regulating customer choice, and not what the goods and services are.
This offers an alternative means of reaching the assumed goal of “equal market share”, and does a better job of aligning to the actual cause of poor market performance. Yahoo does not under-perform relative to Google because of a direct interference in Yahoo’s operation, it under-performs because Google offers a superior product and customer choice is un-regulated. The anti-monopoly assumption is that the solution to the “problem” should be some ill-defined limit on what Google can offer to customers, but why is that better than limiting customer freedom of choice?
Obviously, this is a tongue in cheek argument, but reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate tool to exposing the flaws in an opponents argument. What fact justifies putting the burden on Google, rather than on the consumer? Or, why not regulate Yahoo to force it to improve its product, for example by requiring it to put all profits into research and development? Reasons given in opposition to such alternatives can easily be turned into arguments against restricting what Google can do, and have the advantage that your opponent has granted the legitimacy of the principle.

I appreciate the offer, but have no idea what it would take to convince you that you were wrong. I don’t predict that America will devolve into hard Nazism over the next year, it will be more subtle and take longer. Based on local responses (OO) to continued encroachments on individual rights, we can even predict the kind of excuse-making that will be offered by Trump supporters. It is even now a standard response that immigrants have no rights in the US because rights derive from government and not man's nature. There is a delusion that imposing tariffs on imports is not a violation of individual rights, even though the (American) importer pays the tax, and there is a side-show to the effect that this is “just punishment” of businesses that deal with nations which violate individual rights (China, Canada, Mexico – plainly a delusion in the latter two cases). The government has multiple structural contradictions that result in rights violations: interference in the market by requiring government approval of action. So simply withdraw approvals – which results in a blanket prohibition, not a removal of the rights violations in the first place. We will concretely discover the consequences of exercising individual rights because the federal government will withdraw money from states that have become dependent on federal largesse. The new rule will be "If you exercise your rights, we will withdraw financial support". The proper rule would be unconditional "we will withdraw financial support", and not punitive "we will withdraw support if you do not comply with our demand to restrict individual rights".
You are exactly right that Trump has rejected the traditional reason-based rhetoric of traditional conservatives, no doubt substantially aided by the religious right which were the leading edge of the perversion of conservatism and the interest in individual rights. It is irrational to hope that there will be a return to the rule of law and reason, those days are over for the foreseeable future. And the seeds of destruction were indeed planted by the radical left back in the 60’s.
The reason why Trump prevailed in the last election was not an appeal to a mythical pent-up frustration in the US with expanding government violation of individual rights, is was the simple fact that the (original) competition was senile and the last-minute replacement was manifestly unfit for the job. Your question where is the other antidote on the horizon is spot on. The Republicans dug for themselves a hole so deep and lined with garbage that De Santis was (ugh) the “best alternative”, and hardly an alternative at all. For laughs I might point to a Libertarian party candidate, but those are not realistic candidates – despite their political platforms, they just do not gain enough votes to be worth even talking about. There simply are no marginally reasonable choices for President in the US. Trump was the worst of the two in this last round because of what he brings to the table that is significantly new – a change from a society of laws to a society of managerial decisions. Though more specifically, what he introduced was the absoluteness of his abandonment of the rule of law. Expansion of executive power is the brain-child of the Democrats, Trump was simply inspired by his more-constrained predecessors in the Donkey Party.

I appreciate the offer, but have no idea what it would take to convince you that you were wrong. I don’t predict that America will devolve into hard Nazism over the next year, it will be more subtle and take longer. Based on local responses (OO) to continued encroachments on individual rights, we can even predict the kind of excuse-making that will be offered by Trump supporters. It is even now a standard response that immigrants have no rights in the US because rights derive from government and not man's nature. There is a delusion that imposing tariffs on imports is not a violation of individual rights, even though the (American) importer pays the tax, and there is a side-show to the effect that this is “just punishment” of businesses that deal with nations which violate individual rights (China, Canada, Mexico – plainly a delusion in the latter two cases). The government has multiple structural contradictions that result in rights violations: interference in the market by requiring government approval of action. So simply withdraw approvals – which results in a blanket prohibition, not a removal of the rights violations in the first place. We will concretely discover the consequences of exercising individual rights because the federal government will withdraw money from states that have become dependent on federal largesse. The new rule will be "If you exercise your rights, we will withdraw financial support". The proper rule would be unconditional "we will withdraw financial support", and not punitive "we will withdraw support if you do not comply with our demand to restrict individual rights".
You are exactly right that Trump has rejected the traditional reason-based rhetoric of traditional conservatives, no doubt substantially aided by the religious right which were the leading edge of the perversion of conservatism and the interest in individual rights. It is irrational to hope that there will be a return to the rule of law and reason, those days are over for the foreseeable future. And the seeds of destruction were indeed planted by the radical left back in the 60’s.
The reason why Trump prevailed in the last election was not an appeal to a mythical pent-up frustration in the US with expanding government violation of individual rights, is was the simple fact that the (original) competition was senile and the last-minute replacement was manifestly unfit for the job. Your question where is the other antidote on the horizon is spot on. The Republicans dug for themselves a hole so deep and lined with garbage that De Santis was (ugh) the “best alternative”, and hardly an alternative at all. For laughs I might point to a Libertarian party candidate, but those are not realistic candidates – despite their political platforms, they just do not gain enough votes to be worth even talking about. There simply are no marginally reasonable choices for President in the US. Trump was the worst of the two in this last round because of what he brings to the table that is significantly new – a change from a society of laws to a society of managerial decisions. Though more specifically, what he introduced was the absoluteness of his abandonment of the rule of law. Expansion of executive power is the brain-child of the Democrats, Trump was simply inspired by his more-constrained predecessors in the Donkey Party.

It is a characteristic of the neocon movement, especially the MAGA offshoot, that limited government and individual rights are secondary, to be subordinated to the primary goal of National Greatness. When rights are subordinated to “collective greatness”, you have exactly the premise that leads to and did lead to fascism. I do suggest reading Neoconservatism, which analyzes this intellectual shift in-depth – an analysis echoes in the OP.
Entirely consistent with the leftist epistemology underlying the MAGA cult, we find Trump engaging in the same kind of rhetorical abuses always practices by the standard left (not the Trotskyite left-turned-right). There is no denying that intellectual dishonesty is the main tool of all oppressors

So what kind of fascism does that justify? I understand that every wrong must be cancelled by another wrong, in the new regime, I just don't see which specific wrong is thus justified. Or does it matter – is it that any wrong is justified to balance an existing wrong?

Some of us are familiar with the 2012 book Neoconservatism: an obituary for an idea by C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook, which documents the subversion of conservatism by the radical left. For a while, there was a terminological division between neocons and Reagan Republicans, the former being the ideological leftists that subverted the conservative movement, but there seems to be little left of the traditional conservative movement. The utterly uncivilized methods of Trumpism, culminating in the January 6 riots, have exact parallels in the leftist antics ranging from numerous anti-war riots, the Days of Rage, WTO riots, BLM riots, and a widespread “shut it down” policy of suppressing speakers whom they disagree with.
There is a real difference between Trump and the hard left. The Hard Left wants to outlaw profit and private ownership, Trump wants to maximize profit and private ownership by whatever means necessary. Both sides recognize that this requires the ability to (over)write the law, and they agree that reason and persuasion are fragile tools for achieving their ends.

It is a characteristic of the neocon movement, especially the MAGA offshoot, that limited government and individual rights are secondary, to be subordinated to the primary goal of National Greatness. When rights are subordinated to “collective greatness”, you have exactly the premise that leads to and did lead to fascism. I do suggest reading Neoconservatism, which analyzes this intellectual shift in-depth – an analysis echoes in the OP.
Entirely consistent with the leftist epistemology underlying the MAGA cult, we find Trump engaging in the same kind of rhetorical abuses always practices by the standard left (not the Trotskyite left-turned-right). There is no denying that intellectual dishonesty is the main tool of all oppressors

The crucial distinction does lie in ending the leviathan state, not just swapping out and even increasing bureaucrat for bureaucrat. Simple firing is no proof of good intent. The premise of eliminating the leviathan is not “you got the wrong guy in that position”, it is “that position should not exist in the first place”. There is a common business practice of sacking-and-replacing in order to work around the higher wages of more experiences employees, so as a money-saving but not actual bureaucracy-reducing move, you could fire everybody and replace them with fresh graduates or even unpaid interns. Then repeat in another 8 years, though eventually people will catch on. What we want is not “efficiency”, we want “less government”. The SS was efficient, so was Cheka / NKVD / KGB / FSB, Savak / Vevak / Vaja or the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
It’s difficult to make this distinction, but government jobs can be assessed on a propriety scale. Soldiers and police fall on the “more proper” range of that scale, also jailers, judges and attorneys. Somewhere on the “yes” side of the line would be diplomats who represent the US to foreign countries. Theoretically, infrastructure necessary to the maintenance of more-proper governmental services would be farmed out to private industry, but at least right this month, that’s an idealistic hallucination, there will still be engineers, janitors, programmers and accountants making government operations possible. The right question is: which departments should first be eliminated entirely. Some good candidates for mass reduction (total elimination) are: the Dept’s of Agriculture, Energy, Education, Labor,  Interior, HHS, HUD and Transportation. Plus, the entire DOGE bureaucracy should be eliminated. First on the second round chopping block would be VA, and the entire Treasury section that is the IRS.
We will not be able to evaluate the present scheme of firings as being “brand shifting” versus actual bureaucracy reduction, because some of the first people to be fired under the pogrom are the bureaucrats who comply with the legal requirement to provide public records of the government’s operation. Being insulated from any oversight, it’s impossible to point to concrete evidence – the records are now hidden. Eventually, someone will sue and SCOTUS will order Trump or his successor to comply with the law, but it will be too late at that point, and all we will have is the smug knowledge that he carried an ideological purge illegally, as belatedly acknowledged by the courts. And as not even in the slightest a matter of concern for voters. At least, until Musk’s cache of confiscated passwords and financial records of Americans get hacked and half the nation loses its assets because of slovenly data management practices carried out by an incompetent hack who fired everybody that tried to point out why “1234” is not a good password for crucial data.
The proper means is by law rather than mob or dictatorial action, but this society has little interest in subordinating government to objective law, which is a crying shame.

 

Have you never been to church, have you never heard the preachers screaming on Sunday mornings? It's very simple: people do not understand money, they have no idea where it comes from, they just know that it is the root of all evil. In order to compat these ideas, you have to understand what the ideas are.

Every year, most adults directly pay many thousands of dollar to the federal government in income taxes. Then there are state income taxes, various wealth taxes, innumerable excise taxes. One of those taxes is FICA. There is confusion among people over whether they have a “right” to direct federal give-aways, such as free peanut butter (only if you claim a certain income level), housing and so on, but usually people understand that at best there might be some indirect benefit such as a paying job resulting from some federally subsidised program. FICA is special, though: it is a direct tax on income with the promise of a return. It is structured to deceive people into thinking it is an investment program, in that your return is a function of your payments, and not a function of your “need”.
In relation to balancing the budget and in search for a single big-ticket cut that could at least temporarily reduce the deficit, there are two obvious solutions. One would be to stop SS payments entirely and reassign all of those 4 trillion dollars to the general fund, which could slightly reduce the federal debt by about 10%. The other obvious solution is an increase of taxes. Neither would be particularly popular as a solution, but at some point, reality will become self-enforcing and popularity be damned. In terms of “fair share” where all people are burdened equally, each us us currently owes around $100,000. To pay down this debt, a repayment plan will be necessary, stretched over multiple years. This might be realized as a tax of $10,000 per person per year over 10 years – more and longer of course if the goal is to actually pay the debt. The problem is that for every $10,000 paid into the government, Congress will think “Oh boy, free money! Now we can spend more on programs!”, so the debt will increase exponentially and the debt-tax will have to increase to keep pace.
There is a bold alternative, though, and it would be very popular: shift the burden to the top 20% of earners. People whine about the 1%, but let’s get real, they could just confiscate 50% of everything held by the 20%, and the vast majority could be entirely free of the burden of taxation, with no loss of government entitlements. They could adjust those numbers variably, depending on the level of whining that results from rich people being forced to finally pay their “fair share”.
The focus on “inefficiency” and “fraud” is just plain populist fraud, a side-show to appease the masses. The cause of the sky-rocketing federal debt is the fraudulent premise that the government can create wealth by requiring money to be spent, then printing more money to cover those expenditures. Since The People are unwilling to forego ever-expanding federal benefits and they are unwilling to have their own property subject to increased confiscation, the only solution is going to be to go after the 20%. But even then, after you have wiped out the top 20% and there has been no decrease in federal spending, they will have to next go after the top 40%, and at that point your chances of being unaffected by wealth-nationalization have plummeted, and you might be receptive to one of those other unthinkable solutions. Like, put an end to government spending.

 

What makes RFK dangerous is the fact that he will have and exercise the power of arbitrary force, and paired with his boss’s contempt for law, there is no reason to think that the use of force will be even the slightest under control of objective law. Trump has already done an excellent job of proving the Republicans cannot be trusted as the “defenders of individual rights”. In an Atlas Shrugged sense this could bring about the collapse of civilization which may teach the masses a lesson about the delusion that government control “protects” us. For a real clean sweep, I guess the plan is to completely discredit science and reason, make us return to the stone age, and see if reason and civilization can be re-discovered after a few millenia.

What makes RFK dangerous is the fact that he will have and exercise the power of arbitrary force, and paired with his boss’s contempt for law, there is no reason to think that the use of force will be even the slightest under control of objective law. Trump has already done an excellent job of proving the Republicans cannot be trusted as the “defenders of individual rights”. In an Atlas Shrugged sense this could bring about the collapse of civilization which may teach the masses a lesson about the delusion that government control “protects” us. For a real clean sweep, I guess the plan is to completely discredit science and reason, make us return to the stone age, and see if reason and civilization can be re-discovered after a few millenia.

This is a good subject for a bit of rational thought about science. Has been an increase in autism; for fun, also let’s ask whether there has been an increase in thrombosis (blood clots), and deaths from heart attacks. It seems simple, surely somebody is keeping track of these facts and we just look up the official record. Death by heart attack is not terribly difficult to diagnose, it’s reasonable to think that scientific models fairly closely model reality. Rate of death by heart attack has decreased over the last 15 years. Thrombosis, on the other hand, is not self-evident until (a) you have a severe symptom or (b) for some reason, you get a scan. Turns out that the instance of undiagnosed thrombosis is higher than expected, there are more ticking time bombs than doctors have been aware of. There has to be some good mechanism of diagnosis and reporting, other than very expensive scanning on a routine basis.
Autism is in an even worse category: it is an arbitrary classification without well-defined, stable boundaries. As they say, it is a “spectrum” (ASD), an ever-expanding set of functional symptoms without a specific known physical cause. There is no blood test for “autism”. A person is “on the spectrum” if and only if they exhibit symptoms described in a particular publication. One of them is ICD-11 CDDG which was precede by ICD-10 and as you can tell from the name, there were multiple preceding versions. There is also DSM-5-TR, DSM-5, DSM-IV and so on. Things like schizophrenia, Asperberger syndrome and ASD and so on are classified differently depending on version. The question of whether there has been an “increase” depends on the current definition, and the surveys conducted to test where there has been an increase or decrease. It is generally agreed by researchers in that area that existing standard criteria are ineffective. If you don’t know how to diagnose cancer versus heart attacks then it’s obviously going to be difficult to compare a count of one versus the other.
In addition, mental illness has become somewhat trendy (or, less stigmatized). One can find evidence for a historical “increase in homosexuality” not because people have changed over time but because people are now less fearful of telling the truth about themselves. Homosexuality used to be stigmatized as a mental illness, but was removed from the revision of ICD-9 to ICD-10. You should expect there to be an increase when diagnosis relies on a patient’s willingness to report facts (implying a prior willingness to seek treatment).
If there isn’t a stable diagnosis of “autism” then establishing a genetic as opposed to environmental cause is quite the stretch. Maybe some day they will find a family with a huge rate of unambiguous autism which will lead to a genetic diagnosis, for now the only responsible thing to say is “cause unknown”.
So now let us address the data question. The response “Uh, has he heard of Google” is just shockingly ignorant and irresponsible. The only thing stupider than Google for scientific knowledge is ChatGPT. Google does not give you marginally reliable scientific answers, but there is a chance that you can stumble onto a link to a credible scientific article in a peer-reviewed medical journal by Googling something (can you access the article and actually interpret it?). The responsible reply to “show me the data” is to show the actual primary data. RFK’s purported response is a trivial knee-jerk response to any scientific claim, to deny that there is any data. You may have heard of “climate-change deniers”. It is scientifically stupid to engage in scientific debates in a political forum with a denier non-scientist, when those asking the questions are also scientifically incompetent.
This kind of issue is standardly addressed in court by having testimony from both sides. Scientist A would testify, citing specific data, that “vaccines are safe in this fashion”. Scientist B would counter-testify, citing other specific data, that “vaccines are unsafe in this fashion”. Pitting observation against observation, reason against reason. The closest thing to that during the Senate interrogation was when Bill Cassidy mentions a meta-study apparently by Pietrantonj et al (doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD004407.pub5), which looked not at the primary data but on the conclusions reached in 138 studies of 23,480,668 subjects. Not a single concrete observational datum was at issue in the hearing. How do you scientifically refute a meta-study?
What exactly is RFK “denying”? Apparently, that vaccines are provably safe. How do you prove that something is “safe”, for example decapitation, cigarettes or some randomly-selected medicine? It is pretty firmly concluded that decapitation is 100% “unsafe”. Oddly, some people smoke yet don’t die instantly, but reasonable people don’t conclude that “smoking is safe”. You might get away with it. Some small number of people might have an adverse reaction to some generally safe medical treatment, we don’t therefore declare that “One adverse reaction means it is unsafe!”. The question whether vaccines are “safe” is scientifically stupid, the proper question is whether there is substantial credible evidence that proves that vaccines are unsafe. The burden of proof lies on the person who claims that the treatment is unsafe and should therefore be restricted by the government. The meta-study does fling out a bunch of conclusions drawn in the primary studies and they do not conclude that “vaccines are safe”. They give concrete numbers for various kinds of “unsafeness”. So what? Injections of heroin or cyanide are probably unsafe, everything else like peanuts “has some risk”.
Those huge micro-printed medical synopses that come with your prescription drugs (which nobody bothers to read) all say very clearly “Nothing is completely safe”. The medical profession has one standard for assessing risk, you can accept or reject that standard, and you have to live with the consequences of your decision. That is, unless the government intervenes and prohibits a treatment because it isn’t “proven to be safe” – the wrong question to be asking.
The danger of RFK as Sec’y of HHS is not his medical ignorance, it is the risk that his testimony to Cassidy will turn out to be a lie. Cassidy asks “If you are confirmed, do you commit that you will not work to impound, divert, or  otherwise reduce any funding appropriated by Congress for the purpose of vaccination programs” (response: yes) then “And do you commit that you will not impose new grant conditions outside of congressional direction for state, local, or global entities that in any way limits, restricts, or rescinds access to vaccines or vaccine promotion programs”, (response: yes). The only problem here is that this is not an enforceable, binding commitment. This is the nature of promises by all politicians, which are even less reliable in the case of unelected bureaucrats.

First point: requiring licenses for a person to engage in a business is the epitome of leftist nanny-state thinking, the opposite of the position one would expect from a supposed free-market advocate. Second point: stop whining about Trump pushing the limits on government power when you just advocated a massively unconstitutional governmental action. Read Art. I, Sec. 6 and the First Amendment to the US constitution. Third point: a corollary of the second: there is no existing legal mechanism in any state for stripping a physician of his license to practice for an particular vote or expression of opinion. Argue that he deserves to be defeated at the polls, if you can make a cogent argument. Fourth point: this irrational ideology can be extended in infinitely many ways, most obvious “any Senator or Representative who is a lawyer and votes for a law that violates the rights of an individual deserves to be stripped of his license to practice”, or more simply “anyone who enables further rights violations should be permanently barred from existing”. Now that I say it, maybe that is the solution – it is much more principled than this ad hominem attack. Maybe you should issue a shoot-on-sight fatwa against any rights-violator.
Maybe you are engaged in the fine art of hyperbolic rhetoric and you don’t “really” believe what you literally said. There has been a recent exponential expansion of rhetorical lies in politics, where people knowingly say false things in order to make a point. Hitler knew that people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone ‘could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously’. Trump is famous for having repeatedly made the accusation that he was “cheated” out of the presidency in 2020. Should the big lie be promulgated because it might result in a desirable short-term goal?
Your question “Why wouldn't a President want to be surrounded by the best possible advisors? Who wouldn't want an ally to stop him short of making a stupid move?” is based on a premise that needs to be carefully examined. What kind of advice should a president be seeking, and what constitutes a “stupid move”? One answer is “whatever protects the political position of ruling party”. Another is “whatever yields the greatest common good”. That is complicated math: is it better to make 20% suffer 10% more, or should 1% be made to suffer 99% more. False dichotomy! As every Objectivist knows.
The question of the efficacy of vaccinations is a medical question, not a moral-political one. The only valid moral-political question about vaccination whether the government should, via taxation and regulation, control the development and distribution of vaccines (as opposed to letting entrepreneurs and customers in a free market determine what medicines will be created). The only competent question about a nomination for secretary of HHS is “What the hell are we doing having such a bureaucrat in the first place?”. The one relevant issue regarding RFK in this position is whether he will use the power of the position to massively violate individual rights, more so that others would. This question applies not just to RFK, but to every Secretary of HHS and the answer is “of course they will! That is the essence of the job description”. Any journalist who does not see this should have his license to write revoked (see the preceding paragraph about hyperbolic statements). The “best possible” advisor on federal health and human services would be an ideologue who advises that “health and human services is not within the scope of proper government”, one who completely rejects the premise that the government’s job is to make medical decisions for you. Let’s see, who was the most recent “best advisor” on that point…
To make the case that a particular nomination for a government position is “objectively bad”, you have to go beyond an irrational emotional outburst that the candidate is “objectively bad”. Give us some actual facts and principles that support the claim that these are “objectively bad” nominations, beyond the simple observation “There shouldn’t be such a position in the first place”. Links to equally emotional but factually unsupported denunciations of candidates as “unqualified” just kicks the can down the road. A person isn’t objectively unqualified just because Bernie Sanders or NPR say they are. Recall that Bush I was not a spy, yet was served as Director of the CIA. Where is the outrage. Leon Panetta was just another unqualified hack politician, who briefly served in the Army intelligence corps after graduating from college, where is the outrage? Indeed, his being unqualified – lack of exposure to CIA bureaucracy was a fact cited in support of his nomination.

However, nature can be commanded, so you can command nature to take a specific course, if we understand nature.\
I invite the Letendre troll to post yet another laughing hyena emotional outburst in response to Objectivism.

1: Humans do not store vast numbers of true sentences, thus we do not memorize the fact that “yellow dogs have 4 limbs”, “red dogs have 4 limbs”, “black dogs have 4 limbs”… “wolves have 4 limbs”, “bears have 4 limbs”, “non-trans straight male humans have 4 limbs”, “non-trans homosexual female humans have 4 limbs”… “orangutans have 4 limbs” and so on. There is only one worthy sentence to memorize when it comes to the 4 limb proposition (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to reduce all of the preceding epistemological fluff to a small system of actually true sentences. I also leave it as an advanced exercise to the reader to explain why such sentences are).
2: From a decent epistemology and ordinary factual knowledge, you can compute the fact that red dogs have 4 limbs. There is no realistic context where a person would need to be told that red dogs have 4 limbs, but it is the sort of pointless sentence that comes up in philosophy all the time, usually for the purpose of asserting something else (not as a request for information). In asking whether it is true that “spiders have 8 legs”, you are not actually requesting information, you are doing something else.
3: So in the realm of “asked and answered”, I replace your question with a more worthy question: what evolutionary development resulted in chelicerates developing their characteristic body plan distinguishing them from other arthropods, and perhaps auxiliary questions that address counterexamples to a broad 8-legged claim. Knowing that is analogous to knowing the answer to the preceding question, and again knowing the broadest causal principle is vastly superior to knowing a billion taxonomic facts.
My suggestion is to question the concept of truth (“check your assumptions”). Re-discover the value of “true” versus “false”. “Sentences uttered while watching the mountain” does not define an epistemologically significant class of sentences, because it is useless. Proper concepts are by nature useful. Then, tell me why you reject the current AI epistemological model (if you do!), where you simply assemble petabytes of data points and mull over that heaving sea of “information”. At some point, you will have to address the question of how “truth” has utility for man. This is where the “is-ought” transition comes in, whereby you can grasp the import of my exercise to the reader in #1.
If you understand, integrate, agree and accept the above, then you should reject disingenuous questions that do not seek new information. You might still utter "How many legs do men have?" as a set-up for a real point (perhaps about adult male humans, perhaps about human genetics), but this is not an honest new-information question, so you should quickly, when challenged, reveal the true intent.
Uh, show me proof that this has ever happened. Not AI-doctored or Photoshopped video, hard proof.

It's pretty easy to replicate if you have a sufficiently strong magnet and a magnetic coin (a commercial product). I thought it was clear that we were excluding such a set-up. The magnetic force can be sufficient to overcome basic momentum and gravity principles that defeat the "impossibility" conclusion.

It is often useful to quote Rand's actual words, in trying to explain what Objectivism says about a topic. So,
Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.
Causality Versus Duty, PWNI 99
 

I disagree with the premise that the current problem stems from an altruistic premise. While altruism plays a significant role on people’s thinking, the main cause of the current demise of Americanism is a complete misunderstanding of “protecting individual rights”.
The fundamental shift in thinking has been from “freedom to act” to “entitlement to have”. It is now standard that one has a “right” to food, shelter, education, medical care, a job or other means of support, dignity and related psychological rights, protection of “the family unit” (thus, marriage as a special legal status), the right to any and all “public services” therefore a “right to social security” (those conditions which make you feel secure in a society – the safety net), and any “economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality” (by now you will recognize that I am citing the UDHR), not to mention the right to join unions, paid holidays and so on. In addition, rights are in a random relation to each other: one may have a right to property, but another individual’s right to political or religious exception trumps one’s proprty rights (right to property is not generally acknowledged as an individual right).
To repeat, the moral collapse that has infected the world is not due to a massive altruistic premise that “I need to sacrifice myself for the sake of others”. Most people (voters) who cause the expansion of government are not thinking “I have no right to exist for my own sake, service to others is my only justification for existence, self-sacrifice is my highest moral value”. Instead, they are thinking “I have these various rights, the government is supposed to look after my rights”. In order to gain the pot of gold promised by politicians, someone must be sacrificed, but not me!. This false “resolution of contradiction” is enabled by the evil anti-concept “fair share”, which is where those with more wealth have that wealth taken away and given to me until I have as much wealth as them. (By magic, if you only confiscate wealth from those richer than you, you will not suffer personally from such tax schemes).
Altruism does, of course, play a role in eat-the-rich schemes, when wealthy idiots publically prostrate themselves on the sacrificial altar, serving as role models – The Gates, Bezos, Warren Buffet, Musk, Zuckerberg… People support expanded government action not because they feel that they need to contribute to the betterment of their economic inferiors, but because they want stuff to be provided by the government, regardless of the means of doing so.

Morality does not “apply” when existence qua man is impossible. Morality is a code guiding your choices, which implements your goal of existing as man. To take a bizarre but clear scenario, if you fall out of an airplane at 10,000 ft. your existence is now completely out of your control, and nothing you do will affect you impending non-existence.
Suicide is different, because it denies the fundamental premise of morality – the goal of existing. You could say that a decision to kill yourself is justified under some circumstance, but it is not moral: it denies the validity of the concept of morality.
Many bodily functions are automatic and will continue while you are in a permanent coma. Excluding external medical intervention, you will eventually cease to exist if you do not take certain actions to continue existing, for example eating and drinking. You cannot “automatically eat”, even though your heart does automatically function. That is the point at which “chosing” is concretized. You can be forced to remain alive, by being “fed”. You can choose to live or die, by “eating”, or not.

But he just did! So I don't understand your position that it is impossible.

The most significant first salvo in Trump’s attack against foreigners is his interpretative directive regarding “citizen”, which says that

            Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States:  (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
One has to fill in some gaps to make this argument complete. These points will no doubt be explicitly argued when the case reaches the appeals courts. Para 6 of the TRO against the order only gives a simple statement of why plaintiffs are likely to succeed. For our temporary entertainment (or, in anticipation of a forthcoming legal apocalypse), we can consider the probable logic that can be applied to this case.

The key constitutional clause is that “All person born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”. Exceptions have long been recognized by reference to English law for a definition of “natural-born British subject”, whereby one is not a natural-born British subject. First, “Any person who (his father being an alien enemy) is born in a part of the British dominions, which at the time of such person's birth is in hostile occupation, is an alien” and “Any person whose father (being an alien) is at the time of such person's birth an ambassador or other diplomatic agent accredited to the Crown by the Sovereign of a foreign State is (though born within the British dominions) an alien”. This defines the common law presumption that underlies the US Constitution.
In the Slaughterhouse Cases (16 Wall. 83 U. S. 72), the court makes a distinction between citizenship in a state, and citizenship in the US:


              The distinction between citizenship of the United States and citizenship of a State is clearly recognized and established. Not only may a man be a citizen of the United States without being a citizen of a State, but an important element is necessary to convert the former into the latter. He must reside within the State to make him a citizen of it, but it is only necessary that he should be born or naturalized in the United States to be a citizen of the Union.

 
That ruling also states the standard interpretation of ‘subject to its jurisdiction’:
            The phrase, 'subject to its jurisdiction' was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States."

 
In US v. WAK, the court dials back this position a bit, noting that “neither Mr. Justice Miller nor any of the justices who took part in the decision of The Slaughterhouse Cases understood the court to be committed to the view that all children born in the United States of citizens or subjects of foreign States were excluded from the operation of the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment is manifest…”, referring to Minor v. Happersett (1874), 21 Wall. 162, 88 U. S. 166-168. Instead, 
            Allegiance and protection are, in this connection…reciprocal obligations. The one is a compensation for the other: allegiance for protection, and protection for allegiance. . . . At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children, born in a country of parents who were its citizens, became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further, and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction, without reference to the citizenship of their parents.

 
Here is the ticking time bomb:
            As to this class, there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case, it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens.
The court in US v. WAK then claims that

            The real object of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, in qualifying the words, "All persons born in the United States" by the addition "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof," would appear to have been to exclude, by the fewest and fittest words (besides children of members of the Indian tribes, standing in a peculiar relation to the National Government, unknown to the common law), the two classes of cases -- children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign State -- both of which, as has already been shown, by the law of England and by our own law from the time of the first settlement of the English colonies in America, had been recognized exceptions to the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the country.
It is uncontroversial that there exists a traditional definition of those who are not natural born citizens (a fatal lacuna in Roe v. Wade). The core of the “subject to jurisdiction” argument starts at p. 169.

It is utterly uncontroversial that every alien who is present in the US, other than a POW or diplomat, is subject to the laws of the US. Were that not the case, and were Trump’s assertion about offspring of aliens who are either illegal or temporary not being “subject to US jurisdiction” true, that would mean that offspring of such persons are, like POWs and diplomats, immune from criminal prosecution of civil action – a ludicrous assertion. That is the difference between those subject to jurisdiction, and those immune to jurisdiction.

Whenever the court utters an unprincipled statement like “For the purposes of this case, it is not necessary to solve these doubts”, you can predict that such failure to identify a principle will come back to bite you, or more precisely, us. There is a strong argument from tradition that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” has an extremely narrow application. I predict that the order will be obliterated, possibly even by SCOTUS explicitly reaffirming the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. Still, nothing is certain with this court.

The most significant first salvo in Trump’s attack against foreigners is his interpretative directive regarding “citizen”, which says that

            Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States:  (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
One has to fill in some gaps to make this argument complete. These points will no doubt be explicitly argued when the case reaches the appeals courts. Para 6 of the TRO against the order only gives a simple statement of why plaintiffs are likely to succeed. For our temporary entertainment (or, in anticipation of a forthcoming legal apocalypse), we can consider the probable logic that can be applied to this case.

The key constitutional clause is that “All person born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”. Exceptions have long been recognized by reference to English law for a definition of “natural-born British subject”, whereby one is not a natural-born British subject. First, “Any person who (his father being an alien enemy) is born in a part of the British dominions, which at the time of such person's birth is in hostile occupation, is an alien” and “Any person whose father (being an alien) is at the time of such person's birth an ambassador or other diplomatic agent accredited to the Crown by the Sovereign of a foreign State is (though born within the British dominions) an alien”. This defines the common law presumption that underlies the US Constitution.
In the Slaughterhouse Cases (16 Wall. 83 U. S. 72), the court makes a distinction between citizenship in a state, and citizenship in the US:


              The distinction between citizenship of the United States and citizenship of a State is clearly recognized and established. Not only may a man be a citizen of the United States without being a citizen of a State, but an important element is necessary to convert the former into the latter. He must reside within the State to make him a citizen of it, but it is only necessary that he should be born or naturalized in the United States to be a citizen of the Union.

 
That ruling also states the standard interpretation of ‘subject to its jurisdiction’:
            The phrase, 'subject to its jurisdiction' was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States."

 
In US v. WAK, the court dials back this position a bit, noting that “neither Mr. Justice Miller nor any of the justices who took part in the decision of The Slaughterhouse Cases understood the court to be committed to the view that all children born in the United States of citizens or subjects of foreign States were excluded from the operation of the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment is manifest…”, referring to Minor v. Happersett (1874), 21 Wall. 162, 88 U. S. 166-168. Instead, 
            Allegiance and protection are, in this connection…reciprocal obligations. The one is a compensation for the other: allegiance for protection, and protection for allegiance. . . . At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children, born in a country of parents who were its citizens, became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further, and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction, without reference to the citizenship of their parents.

 
Here is the ticking time bomb:
            As to this class, there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case, it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens.
The court in US v. WAK then claims that

            The real object of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, in qualifying the words, "All persons born in the United States" by the addition "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof," would appear to have been to exclude, by the fewest and fittest words (besides children of members of the Indian tribes, standing in a peculiar relation to the National Government, unknown to the common law), the two classes of cases -- children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign State -- both of which, as has already been shown, by the law of England and by our own law from the time of the first settlement of the English colonies in America, had been recognized exceptions to the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the country.
It is uncontroversial that there exists a traditional definition of those who are not natural born citizens (a fatal lacuna in Roe v. Wade). The core of the “subject to jurisdiction” argument starts at p. 169.

It is utterly uncontroversial that every alien who is present in the US, other than a POW or diplomat, is subject to the laws of the US. Were that not the case, and were Trump’s assertion about offspring of aliens who are either illegal or temporary not being “subject to US jurisdiction” true, that would mean that offspring of such persons are, like POWs and diplomats, immune from criminal prosecution of civil action – a ludicrous assertion. That is the difference between those subject to jurisdiction, and those immune to jurisdiction.

Whenever the court utters an unprincipled statement like “For the purposes of this case, it is not necessary to solve these doubts”, you can predict that such failure to identify a principle will come back to bite you, or more precisely, us. There is a strong argument from tradition that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” has an extremely narrow application. I predict that the order will be obliterated, possibly even by SCOTUS explicitly reaffirming the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. Still, nothing is certain with this court.

The narator makes a substantial (fatal) error in identifying the “fundamental question”, as being about “scarce resources”. Objectivism clearly understands that “scarce resources” is a distraction, this guy incorrectly thinks of government as a tool of Divine Macroeconomics. The central question is based on the fact that man’s actions are not metaphysically given, then are chosen (with the concommitant concept of “free will” – chosen means “freely, optionally selected”). From this fundamental error in fundamentals, we predict that the discussion will rapidly go off the rails.

 
Divine Macroeconomics is a theory with an invalid unchecked premise, that all actors are rational. Actually, quite a number of people are just plain nuts. The primary concern therefore should be determining “what do we do about people who just plain nuts?”. Some people who are nuts are benignly nuts (sleeping bag guy under the freeway), but others are seriously dangerous to others. This defines the primary job of law, which is to classify “allowed” from “disallowed” actions.

 
This particular spinning of the Non-Aggression Principle as being about “initiating conflicts” is offensively wrong even from the anarchist perspective. “Conflict” is not the same as “force”. This is so obvious and well known that I am offended that he initiated conflicts by forcing me to say that. He follows by making ludicrous false statements about “the law of the jungle”: if Friday takes your stuff, you “cannot complain” because everybody is free to initiate conflicts. Here’s a hidden premise: there’s a list of circumstances under which you can complain. That’s just sloppy thinking. Under all models of government, you can complain, that is an axiom from Objectivism that actions are chosen. You can complain. Under a rights-respecting government, there are different consequences to complaining, compared to under anarchy.