-
Posts
9906 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
181
Reputation Activity
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from EC in Reblogged:Two Objectivists on the Presidential Election
The underlying reason is that they have deluded themselves into thinking that their feelings about reality and justice are correct, and any opposition is therefore incorrect. Accordingly, all action in pursuit of justice is morally just. This follows from denying an political axiom of Objectivism regarding man as a rational being. But like many of their their aging boomer leftist predecessors, some are vandals just for giggles.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from SpookyKitty in Reblogged:Two Objectivists on the Presidential Election
Under statutory law (Impoundment Control Act of 1974) and Supreme Court ruling (Train v. City of New York, 420 U.S. 35) this would be illegal, and an impeachable offense. Although, as we know, impeachement schmimpeachment, can you get a conviction? But this problem is about Trump, not Kennedy, and we have plenty of Trump problems.
As for spending and other actions for the purpose of “common defense that is non-military”, there are also proper expenditures that are non-military, viz. courts, the infrastructure of law-making (somebody has to record and codify actions that constitute creating and repealing laws) and police, at the very minimum. You extend this to checking for communicable disease for immigrants and the military, but only on a “seems” basis, why can’t I say that it also “seems” right to check everybody for communicable diseases (the common cold?). Or just Ebola (and why only immigrants as opposed to all people entering the US?). For this path to be pertinent to your fears about RFK, in particular his anti-vaccination delusion, you should also include “and developing vaccines against communicable diseases” in the things parallel to national defense. The problem, as I am sure you recognize, is that this slippery slope can easily be extended to “against diseases”, including self-inflicted diseases – alcholism and vaccine-refusal being a good example. And you know, it takes more than vaccines to protect against disease, we also need doctors, nurses, and hospitals. You see where this is going. We need a principle to distinguish proper and improper government – e.g. "prohibiting the initiation of force".
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Boydstun in What is "Woke"?
I was fortunate enough to have missed this the first time through. The objective fact is that I won't live long enough to enumerate the uncountable grounds on which this is not even wrong.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Boydstun in Reblogged:Two Objectivists on the Presidential Election
Under statutory law (Impoundment Control Act of 1974) and Supreme Court ruling (Train v. City of New York, 420 U.S. 35) this would be illegal, and an impeachable offense. Although, as we know, impeachement schmimpeachment, can you get a conviction? But this problem is about Trump, not Kennedy, and we have plenty of Trump problems.
As for spending and other actions for the purpose of “common defense that is non-military”, there are also proper expenditures that are non-military, viz. courts, the infrastructure of law-making (somebody has to record and codify actions that constitute creating and repealing laws) and police, at the very minimum. You extend this to checking for communicable disease for immigrants and the military, but only on a “seems” basis, why can’t I say that it also “seems” right to check everybody for communicable diseases (the common cold?). Or just Ebola (and why only immigrants as opposed to all people entering the US?). For this path to be pertinent to your fears about RFK, in particular his anti-vaccination delusion, you should also include “and developing vaccines against communicable diseases” in the things parallel to national defense. The problem, as I am sure you recognize, is that this slippery slope can easily be extended to “against diseases”, including self-inflicted diseases – alcholism and vaccine-refusal being a good example. And you know, it takes more than vaccines to protect against disease, we also need doctors, nurses, and hospitals. You see where this is going. We need a principle to distinguish proper and improper government – e.g. "prohibiting the initiation of force".
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from EC in Reblogged:Two Objectivists on the Presidential Election
Not all expression deserves to be called a “discussion”. A discussion is a reasoned exchange of arguments on a topic. Mindless yelling is not a discussion, and off-topic interruption is not a discussion, it is a tactic designed to end discussion.
I guess: that is what Twitter, Redit and Facebook are for. Not every venue is designed for mindless yapping, some venues specifically have the purpose of serious and thougtful discussion. Perhaps you are saying that no venue should have the purpose of serious intellectual exchange and that all online (or in-person) venues should have no specific purpose, other than “being a place to giggle in public”.
My concern is the degeneration of OO to mindless Trumpian wise cracks and illogic, the forthcoming tendency to have a mainly anti-intellectual non-philosophical bent, like The Other Channel.
In your subsequent post, you say that “I don't know what the solution is. I've been kind of mulling it over, for now, although it certainly isn't to be found in the FCC. But American ‘reporters’, with maybe a handful of exceptions, are evil liars”. These points are related. You (mistakenly) expect that reporters “should” be impartial and objective reporters of fact, but actually they are simply ideologues using a particular text-distribution tool to achieve a social end, just as participants in OO are. Both parties are more or less consistent with the values of their respective managements (I suspect Bezos does not personally agree with most of what the Washington Post says, but he tolerates a certain degree of divergence from what he believes). The difference between them and us (at least, some of us) is that our viewpoint is correct and there is incorrect. Unfortunately, I know for a fact that they have the same “press right, Randians wrong” view about OO – or would, if they thought about OO.
Venues especially public ones for serious discussion of Objectivist philosophy are dwindling. Maybe that doesn’t matter, we can always set up dark web channels, which will probably get promptly hacked by trolls bent on putting an end to discussion of this philosophy.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in Reblogged:Two Objectivists on the Presidential Election
Not all expression deserves to be called a “discussion”. A discussion is a reasoned exchange of arguments on a topic. Mindless yelling is not a discussion, and off-topic interruption is not a discussion, it is a tactic designed to end discussion.
I guess: that is what Twitter, Redit and Facebook are for. Not every venue is designed for mindless yapping, some venues specifically have the purpose of serious and thougtful discussion. Perhaps you are saying that no venue should have the purpose of serious intellectual exchange and that all online (or in-person) venues should have no specific purpose, other than “being a place to giggle in public”.
My concern is the degeneration of OO to mindless Trumpian wise cracks and illogic, the forthcoming tendency to have a mainly anti-intellectual non-philosophical bent, like The Other Channel.
In your subsequent post, you say that “I don't know what the solution is. I've been kind of mulling it over, for now, although it certainly isn't to be found in the FCC. But American ‘reporters’, with maybe a handful of exceptions, are evil liars”. These points are related. You (mistakenly) expect that reporters “should” be impartial and objective reporters of fact, but actually they are simply ideologues using a particular text-distribution tool to achieve a social end, just as participants in OO are. Both parties are more or less consistent with the values of their respective managements (I suspect Bezos does not personally agree with most of what the Washington Post says, but he tolerates a certain degree of divergence from what he believes). The difference between them and us (at least, some of us) is that our viewpoint is correct and there is incorrect. Unfortunately, I know for a fact that they have the same “press right, Randians wrong” view about OO – or would, if they thought about OO.
Venues especially public ones for serious discussion of Objectivist philosophy are dwindling. Maybe that doesn’t matter, we can always set up dark web channels, which will probably get promptly hacked by trolls bent on putting an end to discussion of this philosophy.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from EC in Reblogged:Two Objectivists on the Presidential Election
Historically, OO has had problems with trolls like Letendre, who occasionally drop by and spew irrational right-wing sounding slogans without any serious intellectual content. Once in a while they lose control and spew in such a fashion that they get banned (then there can be the sock-puppet whackamole problem). Malenor was a historical example, but he mostly got tired of his silly game. The Letendre troll is more resilient, but he is showing current signs of hydrophobia and may need to be put down, or at least sequestered to the “Objectivists for Trump” forum.
There is really only one relevant question for OO, specifically management: for any given troll (or worse, sincere lunatic), is their behavior sufficiently destructive to the purposes of OO that they should be banned? This is different from the anti-Kelley ideological purity requirements that circulated some 20 years ago. Alt.philosophy.objectivism blew up because it was utterly un-moderated, whence was born the slightly better humanities.philosophy.objectivism which was mildly moderated but only in the sense that any mention of “Neo” would get you banned and otherwise nothing would. I’m not aware of any instance of ideological banning at OO, but banning of destructive trolls does happen – and should. It’s hard to judge the potentially destructive nature of a troll.
Maybe just castrating the troll by removing the main weapon, the Haha emoticon, would for the troll to use reason rather than emotional outbursts.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in What is "Woke"?
I don’t see any evidence at all for that. Which leads me to think that “racist” means something different to you than it means to me. “Race” (a massively sloppy scientific concept) implies something about genetic classifications of humans (historical ancestory). “Whites” predominantly come historically from Europe, North Africa, and parts of western Asia. “Blacks” come historically from Sub-Saharan Africa, with some interesting additions from the Indian Ocean and points east. The woke “don’t even say it” rule is that you cannot even talk about one culture being “better” than another in some respect, for example you cannot say that Europe excelled in statecraft and intellectual development (philosophy and science), compared to Sub-Saharan Africa, Aboriginal Australia, or the Americas. If we can get past that restriction, then the question that naturally arises is, why? The racist explanation is that Africa, Australia and the Americas were populated by genetically inferior people. The cultural explanation looks, instead, to the underlying causes of the development of civilization, namely specific aspects of the culture.
One specific cultural feature that clearly resulted in civilization in the loose sense is indeed civil-ization, the movement from hunter-gatherer and pastoral lifestyles to agriculture, the developments of cities, and specialization of skills (wheel-making, brick-making and so on). An offshoot of the movement to city life is systematic trade, therefore the need to approach business systematically, meaning the development of writing. Aristotelian philosophy is one superior outgrowth of that trend. We find a number of outposts of civilization throughout the ancient world, notably Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean, India, China, but little in North America and nothing in Australia.
If you believe that living a simple hard life subjugated by nature is the goal towards which man should focus his efforts, then of course you will praise the American Indians and condemn Europeans. We know that Rand held the opposite view.
The reason for Rand’s view of Indians is not the race of the earliest human inhabitants of the US, it is their culture. There is not any reason at all to think that is has to do with the un-chosen characteristic of "race", it is all about the chosen culture. Mother Nature did not create the cultures of Native Americans, Native Americans did. Praise and blame go together in cultural evaluation. Now, I agree that she was vastly under-informed about people and cultures other than Western Europe, I imagine she was completely uninterested in the culture of the upper Midwest of America, but that isn’t racism, that is “culturism”.
Which brings us to the central question: is it ever morally appropriate to evaluate a culture?
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from SpookyKitty in Reblogged:Two Objectivists on the Presidential Election
Historically, OO has had problems with trolls like Letendre, who occasionally drop by and spew irrational right-wing sounding slogans without any serious intellectual content. Once in a while they lose control and spew in such a fashion that they get banned (then there can be the sock-puppet whackamole problem). Malenor was a historical example, but he mostly got tired of his silly game. The Letendre troll is more resilient, but he is showing current signs of hydrophobia and may need to be put down, or at least sequestered to the “Objectivists for Trump” forum.
There is really only one relevant question for OO, specifically management: for any given troll (or worse, sincere lunatic), is their behavior sufficiently destructive to the purposes of OO that they should be banned? This is different from the anti-Kelley ideological purity requirements that circulated some 20 years ago. Alt.philosophy.objectivism blew up because it was utterly un-moderated, whence was born the slightly better humanities.philosophy.objectivism which was mildly moderated but only in the sense that any mention of “Neo” would get you banned and otherwise nothing would. I’m not aware of any instance of ideological banning at OO, but banning of destructive trolls does happen – and should. It’s hard to judge the potentially destructive nature of a troll.
Maybe just castrating the troll by removing the main weapon, the Haha emoticon, would for the troll to use reason rather than emotional outbursts.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in Reblogged:Two Objectivists on the Presidential Election
Although Trump is utterly deplorable and deserves to be consigned to the historical oubliette, this is just fantasy-reasoning. He stands a substantial chance of winning tomorrow, thanks to the fact that the Democrats could not offer a stronger candidate. The only thing Harris has going for her is the argument "At least she is not Trump".
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in What is "Woke"?
“Right”-thinking people – especially Objectivists – tend to think of “free speech” as the political question of government force being used to suppress the expression of a viewpoint, so we will immediately respond that “Only the government can censor”. It is appropriate to reserve the term “censorship” to government action. Every individual has the political right to respond to disagreeable speech in whatever way they deem appropriate, up to but not including violation of the rights of another person.
It is well-established within Objectivism that “tolerance” is a fundamental evil. Just to be clear, “tolerance” refers to the suspension of moral evaluation of evil, the evasion of fact in deriving values – the granting of sanction to evil ideas. A child may be ignorant of an inherent evil because children are generally ignorant, until they become educated. I did not know the N word so when I was around 4 I uttered a child rhyme about catching one by the toe, and was informed that it is a rude term referred to “colored people” (a concept that I didn’t understand, I thought it meant people with colorful stripes). The (understandable) failure of that early childhood lesson is that I only learned a rote fact, that uttering the N word is evil. Likewise I learned later, still as a child, that Nazis are evil, but not why Nazis are evil.
Many of the evils which wokism opposes are indeed evil, indefensible, and not to be tolerated. Wokism itself is an inherently dishonest idea and fundamentally evil approach to moral judgment: it is the mindless acceptance of moral dictates, rejecting the need to reason to choosing a moral code, and to use that moral code to guide your life choices. The most offensive and evil moral principle of woke ideology is the absolute intolerance of expressions deemed to be evil. Can one honestly say that an adult in the US can be “ignorant” of the evil of using the N-word? Of course you can! Some people understand the logic of consigning the N-word to the “evil act” trash-pile. Too many people treat the issue as being above the level of reasoning, as being a self-evident moral law unrelated to general principles and specific facts of history. Did you know that there is another N-word, “Navajo”?, do you know and use the preferred term? If you are ignorant of this fact, shouldn’t we condemn you as being evil? I claim that it is not reasonable to expect normal people to know these facts, but it is reasonable to expect every adult in the US to understand why using the original N-word is evil.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Pokyt in What is "Woke"?
A person is “woke” when they are aware of and adhere to the progressive ideology w.r.t. social matters (which turns out to be "everything"). The foundation of that ideology is the split between the ruling class and the ruled class, woke ideology sees the ruled class as the victim of oppression by the ruling class. The ruling class is the set of white males (in all senses of the word) who are rational and successful in their lives (therefore generally over 30), the ruled class is everybody else. The axiom of woke ideology is that the ruling class oppresses the lower classes, a corollary of which axiom is that all problems of the lower class are imposed on them by the ruling class. The metaphysical force that enables this is “privilege”, which comes in many flavors. Generally the kind of privilege that is invoked in an accusation is the broadest unchosen characteristic of the alleged oppressor that cleanly divides the oppressed vs. the oppressors. If the oppressed can be characterized in two ways (“black” and “female”), an attack on white males could be based on “white male privilege”, “white privilege” or “male privilege”. One has to think strategically about whether an accusation of “white privilege” will piss off white female would-be supporters. It is primarily a racial ideology but has been co-opted to analogs w.r.t. every other demographic you can imagine.
The exact extent of the woke ideology is highly fluid. On average, Black culture is not highly tolerant of homosexuality and there are also issues with women. This defines the fundamental challenge for currently-woke blacks, that they must toe the line on sexual issues. That, or they have to challenge a fundamental axiom of the ideology. The BLM ideological statement has been fluid, at times denouncing sexism. Their resolution of that contradiction has been to focus on “systemic” problems with the system being undefined. This allows a woke black male to harbor anti-queer sentiments, because they are the result of “the system”, not an individual choice.
As we know, a further consequence of wokism is that it is not to be questioned, defined, or resisted. Blacks have largely been left behind in the expansion of woke ideology, and I think this is largely because the specific content of the ideology is not to be discussed or questioned, it is taken to be axiomatic what constitutes social justice.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from EC in What is "Woke"?
A person is “woke” when they are aware of and adhere to the progressive ideology w.r.t. social matters (which turns out to be "everything"). The foundation of that ideology is the split between the ruling class and the ruled class, woke ideology sees the ruled class as the victim of oppression by the ruling class. The ruling class is the set of white males (in all senses of the word) who are rational and successful in their lives (therefore generally over 30), the ruled class is everybody else. The axiom of woke ideology is that the ruling class oppresses the lower classes, a corollary of which axiom is that all problems of the lower class are imposed on them by the ruling class. The metaphysical force that enables this is “privilege”, which comes in many flavors. Generally the kind of privilege that is invoked in an accusation is the broadest unchosen characteristic of the alleged oppressor that cleanly divides the oppressed vs. the oppressors. If the oppressed can be characterized in two ways (“black” and “female”), an attack on white males could be based on “white male privilege”, “white privilege” or “male privilege”. One has to think strategically about whether an accusation of “white privilege” will piss off white female would-be supporters. It is primarily a racial ideology but has been co-opted to analogs w.r.t. every other demographic you can imagine.
The exact extent of the woke ideology is highly fluid. On average, Black culture is not highly tolerant of homosexuality and there are also issues with women. This defines the fundamental challenge for currently-woke blacks, that they must toe the line on sexual issues. That, or they have to challenge a fundamental axiom of the ideology. The BLM ideological statement has been fluid, at times denouncing sexism. Their resolution of that contradiction has been to focus on “systemic” problems with the system being undefined. This allows a woke black male to harbor anti-queer sentiments, because they are the result of “the system”, not an individual choice.
As we know, a further consequence of wokism is that it is not to be questioned, defined, or resisted. Blacks have largely been left behind in the expansion of woke ideology, and I think this is largely because the specific content of the ideology is not to be discussed or questioned, it is taken to be axiomatic what constitutes social justice.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in What is "Woke"?
A person is “woke” when they are aware of and adhere to the progressive ideology w.r.t. social matters (which turns out to be "everything"). The foundation of that ideology is the split between the ruling class and the ruled class, woke ideology sees the ruled class as the victim of oppression by the ruling class. The ruling class is the set of white males (in all senses of the word) who are rational and successful in their lives (therefore generally over 30), the ruled class is everybody else. The axiom of woke ideology is that the ruling class oppresses the lower classes, a corollary of which axiom is that all problems of the lower class are imposed on them by the ruling class. The metaphysical force that enables this is “privilege”, which comes in many flavors. Generally the kind of privilege that is invoked in an accusation is the broadest unchosen characteristic of the alleged oppressor that cleanly divides the oppressed vs. the oppressors. If the oppressed can be characterized in two ways (“black” and “female”), an attack on white males could be based on “white male privilege”, “white privilege” or “male privilege”. One has to think strategically about whether an accusation of “white privilege” will piss off white female would-be supporters. It is primarily a racial ideology but has been co-opted to analogs w.r.t. every other demographic you can imagine.
The exact extent of the woke ideology is highly fluid. On average, Black culture is not highly tolerant of homosexuality and there are also issues with women. This defines the fundamental challenge for currently-woke blacks, that they must toe the line on sexual issues. That, or they have to challenge a fundamental axiom of the ideology. The BLM ideological statement has been fluid, at times denouncing sexism. Their resolution of that contradiction has been to focus on “systemic” problems with the system being undefined. This allows a woke black male to harbor anti-queer sentiments, because they are the result of “the system”, not an individual choice.
As we know, a further consequence of wokism is that it is not to be questioned, defined, or resisted. Blacks have largely been left behind in the expansion of woke ideology, and I think this is largely because the specific content of the ideology is not to be discussed or questioned, it is taken to be axiomatic what constitutes social justice.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in Dr. Peikoff on which party to vote for: GOP or Democrat
The problem is that we are presented with an unreasonable dichotomy – “Would you prefer to be slowly strangled to death, or slowly disemboweled to death?”. Peikoff makes an attempt to arrive at a conclusion based on principles, which is laudable, but the principles have to be validated, especially in the face of competing and countervailing principles. His prescription is based on a collective identification, the typical properties of Republicans versus Democrats, with no regard for the fact that these properties are man-made and deliberately chosen by the individual candidate. It is possible that there is a national pro-socialist bias among Democrat candidates and a pro-religion bias among Republican candidates, however this is a question of fact and not elementary observation. I would like to see some serious scientific evidence that the claim is true, but for the sake of the discussion I will behave as though most Democrat candidates are socialists and most Republican candidates are religious.
However, I find it shocking to assert that socialism is an expired ancient fad having been almost universally rejected for decades. Hard-core communism has been defeated (actually, put in hibernation) in favor of “more moderate” socialism, now renamed progressivism. The socialist agenda has not slowed one iota, it has accelerated and expanded. The ideas of capitalism are nearly dead, and the concept capitalism itself is severely endangered, being kept alive only in a few minds. The word is retained, but the definition has completely change, so that “capitalism” now stands for “maximizing profits”, the means be damned.
While it is true that religion is historically one of the two greatest destroyers of man, so is the lust for power. In the modern world, the primary religious threat to man’s existence is the violent expansion of Islam, which pales in comparison to the inexorable self-sacrificial ideology of socialism being experiences in the West. There are two religiously-based ideas which work their way into contemporary politics: abortion (and related fetal tissue issues), and gender-identification (self-identification and sexual orientation). There are hundreds of socialist ideas pervading modern politics – many instances of the “right to have” ideology, and many instances of the “need to protect (prevent)” ideology. In reading contemporary electoral propaganda, the socialist agenda is boldly out there, as though it is proper to arbitrarily seize another man’s work product and redistribute it to “those in need”. The anti-abortion, sex=gender agenda is only timidly out there, inferrable main from metaphors like “protecting children”.
I agree that what will determine the survival of this country, indeed the survival of man irrespective of country, is fundamental philosophy. The fundamental philosophy of the left is that man is a sacrificial animal. This much is clearly identifiable. The right does not have a fundamental philosophy, it only has a collection of political concretes. It used to be that there was a fundamental philosophy characterizing the right – individual rights. That ideology was abandoned in favor of various political stances aimed at garnering just enough votes, for example crime, drugs, creating jobs, immigration, better schools, accountability… in some instances, veiled references to homosexuality or “the right to life”. There is no right-wing or Republican philosophy.
The collectivist call to mindlessly vote Democrat (or Republican) is based on a correct political identification: that for any issue, the matter will be generally be decided on a party-line basis. The overwhelming majority of Democrat legislators / congressmen will vote in lock step with the overwhelming majority of Democrat legislators / congressmen, likewise the Republicans. There will be odd cases like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney who do not always fall in line, or Joe Manchin (who is now officially out of line) and Mary Peltola. In a closely-divided House and Senate, these individuals become very important in determining the nation’s survival, since they stand the greatest chance of voting by reference to an actual principle, rather than a knee-jerk collective identification – “this is the Democrat / Republican stance on this issue”.
The fundamental error in Peikoff’s syllogism is that the Republicans have a philosophy. Once you recognize that fact, the rational voter will try to discern the actual philosophy of the candidates that they vote on. And that discernment is extremely difficult, like trying to see a polar bear in a blizzard.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Boydstun in Random Keystrokes Will Never Deliver String of Characters in a Human Text such as ANTHEM
It’s mildly amusing to me that among the various terms discussed and refnied w.r.t. this idea, there seems to be no discussion of the terms “typewriter” and “any given text” (or, if you prefer, “The works of Shakespeare”). The probability of a monkey typing “Q” is vastly lower than the probability of typing “q”, and the probability of typing “ï” is effectively zero. You can say “We don’t include any letters requiring the simultaneous pressing of Shift and some other key”, so that “$” is not part of a “text” and Q is the same as q, because “it’s good enough”. If we lower our standards to “good enough that a Shakespearean literature professor could figure it out”, we would probably accept “ll te wrld stge, nd ll th mn d wen mrel plyer”. We can “solve” this by replacing “monkey” with “AI” to overcome motor deficiencies of monkeys (who will almost surely jam he typewriter by random pounding withing less than a minute), but we already know that every AI already contains all the works of Shakespeare.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Jon Letendre in Reblogged:Will the Supremes Open Another Can of Worms?
That bottom note is sheer fantasy. Let's start with the entire entry in that dictionary (Webster's 1828):
the body of men in a state or kingdom, invested with power to make and repeal laws; the supreme power of a state. The legislature of Great Britain consists of the house of lords and the house of commons with the king, whose sanction is necessary to every bill before it becomes a law. The legislatures of most of the states in America, consist of two houses or branches, but the sanction of the govenor is required to give their acts the force of law, or a concurrence of two thirds of the two houses, after he has declined and assigned his objections.
Now let us apply the implicit reasoning to the offending argument. What is novel w.r.t. the US case is "popularly elected", not "legislature", a concept and term that precedes the US Constitution by over a century. As has always been the case in common law jurisdictions ever since the Magna Carta, the legislature alone has the power to make and repeal laws. It has always been a body with a specific membership, and has never included the judiciary, whose sole power is to interpret laws. So it is excessively fantastic reasoning to conclude that the meaning of "legislature" includes the various bureaucrats of the executive branches which refine the vague generalizations of legislature acts into enforceable law; or the police who do the actual enforcement; or the courts which determine the meaning of the law.
Pennsylvania law ("the stuff passed by the PA legislature") expressly forbids what the PA Supreme Court allowed. The law of PA states that a provisional ballot cannot be counted if a mail-in ballot is received in a timely fashion. The two parties did mail in their legally defective ballots on time, then sought to vote with a provisional ballot. The court decided that a defective ballot "never existed", despite the law as passed by the legislature. In other words, the PA Supreme Court re-wrote the law, via their power to interpret the "meaning" of laws. Put more directly, the court decided that the legislature "must have" intended something different from what they actually said.
The standard interpretation of "legislature" as meaning "legislature" may be anachronistic and contrary to modern progressive Living Constitution doctrines which reject constitutional limitations on legislative power. It is also anachronistic to presume the states rights stance that states get to decide the rules for federal voting, and yet it is only due to anachronistic wording in the Constitution that gives power to the state legislatures – not state governments – to determine "such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct".
The current case simply requests that the PA Supreme Court be prevented from rewriting Pennsylvania election law in the manner that it did in Genser. The contribution of ISLD would be the wingnut idea – never actually advanced anywhere – that legislatures can pass election laws not even subject to gubernatorial veto, and certainly not subject to constitutional review. In the case of Gore v. Bush, there was a specific constitutional argument that a selective election board decision in three counties contravened the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. No such argument exists in PA, instead the case for court-determined election laws is based on the purely political question whether all putative ballots "count". True, state supreme courts are supposed to be the final word on all questions of state law, and SCOTUS is the final word on all questions of Federal law – which supersedes state law, especially state law that is actually not state law..
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from EC in How would objectivists respond to François Laruelle’s criticisms of ideology
Probably we would point out that “false dichotomies” are, by definition, false. What is truish about dichotomies is that they refer to a continuous measurement with particular terms assigned to the endpoints. However, I don’t know of any ideology that holds that there is just “hot” or “cold”, “black” or “white”, so it strikes me as much ado about nothing. We certainly have no truck with the synthesis of manifold impressions and the faculties of the understanding. or a split between the ontic and the ontological, nor Derrida's différance/presence. We are certainly not “radically de-anthropocentrized, fundamentally directed towards a universalized, auto-effective set of generic conditions”.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in How would objectivists respond to François Laruelle’s criticisms of ideology
Utterly meaningless gibberish, lifted from the Wiki page. To state the claim is to refute it.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in How would objectivists respond to François Laruelle’s criticisms of ideology
Probably we would point out that “false dichotomies” are, by definition, false. What is truish about dichotomies is that they refer to a continuous measurement with particular terms assigned to the endpoints. However, I don’t know of any ideology that holds that there is just “hot” or “cold”, “black” or “white”, so it strikes me as much ado about nothing. We certainly have no truck with the synthesis of manifold impressions and the faculties of the understanding. or a split between the ontic and the ontological, nor Derrida's différance/presence. We are certainly not “radically de-anthropocentrized, fundamentally directed towards a universalized, auto-effective set of generic conditions”.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in AI and technological unemployment
What happens when
manufacturing jobs require competence in operating power tools but some people cannot operate power tools,
construction jobs require competence in welding but some people cannot weld
business jobs require the ability to code data on a key-punch machine but some people do not know how to do this,
other business jobs require the ability to enter data on an electronic keyboard but some people are incapable at doing this,
yet other business jobs require the ability to enter independently conceptualize problems and discover solutions using fairly brainless interfaces like Excel but some people just can’t manage?
Every man has to discover his proper means of survival. Maybe the solution is to become a subsistence dirt farmer, or to study quantum mechanics and discover how to build a functioning teleporter. Maybe the person will discover a way to market actually-intelligent production that doesn’t depend on the remarkably terrible output of AI, and they will corner the market in AI-Free Customer Service.
Atlas Shrugged offers a brief segment on reality, evasion, trains, and tunnels. This lesson is perfectly applicable to AI. There is a difference, though, that in this case, you can actually smell the poison fumes. Now that you are aware that there is a problem, you could try to solve it, and get rich in the process.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Boydstun in Brother's Keeper?
There is a chapter (Part 3, Ch. 5) of Atlas Shrugged entitles “Their brother’s keeper”, where you can validate the conclusion that you would have drawn from all of her other writings – I think it would be de trop for me to quote all instances there. In her journals she states that “Man is not his brother's keeper. (All responsibility must carry with it the authority to enforce it.)”. In “Check your premises: collectivized ethics” she writes “The altruist-collectivist premise, implicit in that question, is that men are "their brothers' keepers" and that the misfortune of some is a mortgage on others”.
I could not find those specific citations by Google search, but I have the CD so screw Google.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Solvreven in Determinism as presented by Dr. Robert Sapolsky
Quarks are not abstractions, they are concrete entities (at least given the evidence of modern science), however like muons and other slightly larger things, you cannot perceive them directly. They are abstract only in the sense that the evidence for their existence is indirect and not perceptually immediate. In the primacy of consciousness / logical positivist metaphysics, there is a well-known and erroneous confusion between ontological status and method of reasoning. Per your most recent declaration, your metaphysics of quarks embraces that error. Contrarily, I advise you that quarks have the same “stand-alone existence” (whatever that means) as any other really tiny thing.
Awareness of the products of mind, i.e. introspection, is not the same as self, though you are free to adopt that stance and reject the Objectivist position. One could even posit that the brain is the “self”, then we would have three theories of self, and no hope whatsoever of deciding which theory is correct.
In order to study knowing the seeing of the visual field, you must have some means of perceiving the knowing of the seeing of the visual field, but such study also requires understanding, so really you must seek the understanding of the perceiving of the knowing of the seeing of the visual field. I have a simpler interest: How do we perceive entities? I know stuff about the physics and physiology of hearing, much of which involves protracted scientific study of pressure waves and other kinds of waves, neural operation, tonotopic mapping and sticking wires into the bodies of animals (human and otherwise). These are not philosophical questions just as the existence of quarks is not a philosophical question, they are advanced scientific questions requiring highly specialized machinery and training. So of course Objectivism does not describe the neural operations that correspond to concepts or the perception of a sound.
What Objectivism, or any other philosophy, can potentially do is lay out the logic of the concept “experience”. However, as a practical matter there has to be agreement as to what thing we are discussing. Since people often speak figuratively and don’t literally mean what they say, one should insist on some standard of discourse when asking about the nature of “experience”. Does the moon “experience” anything? Does a corpse have experiences? If you have the plague, are you “experiencing” covid itself, or do you have covid and you are experiencing a headache and throat pains? Are you doing something (involuntarily or otherwise) such as coughing, or are you passively experiencing coughing?
If you can answer these questions, then you have some chance of understanding “experience” (more questions and answers are necessary, that’s just a starter). All we are doing here is applying the Objectivist method behind concept formation, of finding similarities and differences that result in a proper definition of “experience”.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from Solvreven in Determinism as presented by Dr. Robert Sapolsky
It is perilous and highly non-essential to try to reduce Rand’s writings – or anyone else’s – to a matter that they “deal with” (I don’t know what my own writings “deal with”). I assume that you really meant that there is a primary goal in a particular work: to explain X or to advocate Y. Obviously, the “relational aspect of individuals within a society” refers to the concept of rights, and it is fair to say that a substantial portion of Rand’s writings had the goal of explaining and justifying a theory of rights, to the point that many people have the confused idea that Objectivism is fundamentally a political theory. Perhaps a plurality of her best-known writings, measured in numbers of words, do focus on politics. But setting up a dichotomy between Objectivism versus Rand’s writings is so bizarre that I can’t even.
One reason why you are struggling to describe or to eff the ineffable is that you are being seduced by meaningless non-referring collocations of words. I too cannot describe the “experience of 'first person being'” or “a core subjectivity of experience of reality”, nor “the locus of awareness”. Part of the problem that you are facing is the replacement of verbs with nouns. Although people can abstract concepts from experience, concepts of action still have to relate to actors and things they act on. In mulling over “awareness”, you seem to have forgotten that only a consciousness can be aware, and they can only be aware of a specific thing. There is no floating awareness. The locus, or more simply, physical location of the act of a consciousness being aware of a thing is really irrelevant. Who cares if you are in Denver or Singapore when you become aware of a fact? Perhaps your interest is really in brain physiology, in which case the relevant (also interesting, and currently unanswerable) question is “What is the mechanism whereby I become aware that the tomato is rotting?”.
As for the “experience of 'first person being'”, I have tried in vain for decades to have a generalized experience of first person being. I have had numerous first person singular present experiences, but no past or future experiences (you don’t have them, you might have some memory or anticipation of them), and I’m not one of those people who thinks that I can experience what we are exposed to, I can only experience what I am exposed to. I certainly cannot have a second or third person experience. Even with all of these refinements, I cannot experience first person singular present being, I can only experience something concrete, such as smelling, seeing, feeling or tasting the tomato. I can only see your post, I cannot smell it. I conclude that there is no such thing as first person being, though I do have experiences.
The struggle that you are facing, in not being able to articulate the experience of first person being, is that there is no such thing, therefore you cannot experience that non-existent, therefore you cannot put into words a proposition that accurately describes that which does not exist.
-
DavidOdden got a reaction from whYNOT in Determinism as presented by Dr. Robert Sapolsky
It is perilous and highly non-essential to try to reduce Rand’s writings – or anyone else’s – to a matter that they “deal with” (I don’t know what my own writings “deal with”). I assume that you really meant that there is a primary goal in a particular work: to explain X or to advocate Y. Obviously, the “relational aspect of individuals within a society” refers to the concept of rights, and it is fair to say that a substantial portion of Rand’s writings had the goal of explaining and justifying a theory of rights, to the point that many people have the confused idea that Objectivism is fundamentally a political theory. Perhaps a plurality of her best-known writings, measured in numbers of words, do focus on politics. But setting up a dichotomy between Objectivism versus Rand’s writings is so bizarre that I can’t even.
One reason why you are struggling to describe or to eff the ineffable is that you are being seduced by meaningless non-referring collocations of words. I too cannot describe the “experience of 'first person being'” or “a core subjectivity of experience of reality”, nor “the locus of awareness”. Part of the problem that you are facing is the replacement of verbs with nouns. Although people can abstract concepts from experience, concepts of action still have to relate to actors and things they act on. In mulling over “awareness”, you seem to have forgotten that only a consciousness can be aware, and they can only be aware of a specific thing. There is no floating awareness. The locus, or more simply, physical location of the act of a consciousness being aware of a thing is really irrelevant. Who cares if you are in Denver or Singapore when you become aware of a fact? Perhaps your interest is really in brain physiology, in which case the relevant (also interesting, and currently unanswerable) question is “What is the mechanism whereby I become aware that the tomato is rotting?”.
As for the “experience of 'first person being'”, I have tried in vain for decades to have a generalized experience of first person being. I have had numerous first person singular present experiences, but no past or future experiences (you don’t have them, you might have some memory or anticipation of them), and I’m not one of those people who thinks that I can experience what we are exposed to, I can only experience what I am exposed to. I certainly cannot have a second or third person experience. Even with all of these refinements, I cannot experience first person singular present being, I can only experience something concrete, such as smelling, seeing, feeling or tasting the tomato. I can only see your post, I cannot smell it. I conclude that there is no such thing as first person being, though I do have experiences.
The struggle that you are facing, in not being able to articulate the experience of first person being, is that there is no such thing, therefore you cannot experience that non-existent, therefore you cannot put into words a proposition that accurately describes that which does not exist.