tito

It's quite fun when you stop caring how ridiculous you probably look!

Yes, I suppose that could work. Video rental is dead where I live. It costs about £4 to rent a DVD for the night, and about £6 to buy it forever. The mass-production of DVDs has made them so inexpensive that the rental industry is in decline.

Public libraries starve the book market. I doubt a "library", outside of a university or academic environment, would be a viable concept in a free market. Except, perhaps, collections of rare books that one can pay to browse. There is no such thing as the 'right to books'. But imagine if every time somebody didn't feel like finding the $8 to buy a book and went to a library, they had purchased the book instead. That would be enormous investment into the book publishing companies. The market would be much bigger, and there would be more incentive to drive for efficiency in publishing. Who knows, we might have had paperbacks for $0.50, or rare books that can be printed on demand at a bookshop.

Indeed, and Israel's weaponry is American. As far as I know, they can't use a nuke without permission from DC.

As opposed to today's public schools? Which systematically destroy a child's ability to think, tear out their conceptual mentality, bore them to never want to open a book again, expose them to repulsive prison-like environments that are completely antithetical to development and produce wave after wave of criminals and drug addicts? Public education is, by nature, impossible to do well - because public always means political. The goal of public education, always, isn't to produce a rational, independent person - but to mould a child into a good citizen: and the effect is always the opposite. If the only education available to me, financially, was public - I would not have children. Public schooling is cruelty beyond belief, it takes an incredibly heroic child to come out of it a rational, productive and benevolent person.

No, it is not morally right. All non-criminal people have the right to be British.

Yes, possibly. Which is why we have a hierarchy of values. A sculptor will value his art enough to put up with the (probably very small) risk of dust harming him, etc.

Suppose Google started a new service, street audio. They drove down public streets and recorded what they heard. At the time, you were in your front garden singing loudly, so that it could be heard from the street. It is you who broadcast this audio, by means of auditory vibrations through the air, to Google's microphone. If you soundproofed your property, and Google drilled a hole through your soundproofing, this would clearly be a violation of your rights. Or if you were singing quietly enough only for people in your property to hear (if this were possible), and Google poked their microphone over your fence, this too would violate your property rights. The same is true of streetview. Your property and its contents act as a filtering reflector. Light hits your property and is reflected (broadcast) with certain colours absorbed by the matter - giving a visual image. This broadcast of electro-magnetic waves goes onto the street, where anybody can access. Aside from building fences or high walls, you can't demand that people do not detect this broadcast with eyes or electronic equipment (charged coupled devices that produce an image in a digital camera) - any more than you can plant a tree in your garden and demand that people in the street don't inhale the oxygen it produces.

Morality applies only to choices made by an individual. Acting altruistically is evil - she opposed altruism on principle, all altruism. It is not true that she only opposed altruism as a principle. This topic is nonsensical. Slacker00, do you honestly think that all of us Objectivists have been busy studying and applying her philosophy for over 50 years, and haven't realised an omission like "Objectivism makes love impossible"? Rand wrote extensively on love, benevolence and companionship. Please read the source before forming an opinion.

Suppose somebody was passing a sexual photograph of you around. It would violate your rights, you haven't consented to people viewing it. Each and every time somebody photocopied it or whatever. If you did consent, it would not be a rights violation. It would just be you making pornography. Children cannot consent to this, and such material can automatically be assumed to be a rights violation.

Untrue. Data on a disk is stored as pointers, it is all over the disk and not in fixed blocks. As you write and delete data, it gets a bit messy, with files spread all over the physical disk (hence the process of 'defragmenting') When you hit the delete button, the disk doesn't actually seek out every byte of the file and scrub it off, it just removes the pointers to it - then goes over it when the physical space is needed. But, there are lots of tools (called things like 'shredders') that will seek out all data in a file and wipe it clean, or will just fill the disk with random 0 and 1 bits, making it irrecoverable. In short, it depends if he just deleted the files (then they are recoverable) or if he actually looked it up on google and used a better tool. It still might be worth reporting. As for the proper legality of child pornography: what if you were walking down the street, nobody else about, and you witnessed a child being raped. Of course, your looking wouldn't make the slightest difference - even if you took a photograph. But it would take someone truly deranged not to notify the police. If a stranger on the street handed you a picture of himself raping a child: you would absolutely report him to the police. The same goes for viewing child pornography online. You are aware that somebody has committed a crime, you have photographic evidence of this, and yet you don't notify the police. Quite clearly it is not the case, when somebody has a 'hard drive full' of such data, that they keep stumbling upon it by chance and just dont want to tell the police. A dangerous mental disorder is likely the cause. This brings up two questions which have probably been discussed here: 1. If one knows of a terrible crime, is he obligated to report it? 2. Should the dangerously mentally ill be separated, by force, from society?

The Human Tissue Act of 2004 effectively rules organ-fascism. In the technical sense of the term (controlling private property). I cannot sell any part of my body, and I cannot even donate it as I see fit. Furthermore, the government keeps saying it will soon produce new "presumption of donation" legislation - whereby donor cards would be obsolete: non-donor cards would be carried by those who don't wish the National Health Service to help themselves.

I do not give blood in the United Kingdom. The government has legislated that it is not my blood. They have, in effect, claimed ownership of my blood and my organs. Just like they have claimed my wallet. To them I have one message: come and get it. They oblige when it comes to money, but not when it comes to blood.

Is this practice worthy of the phrase "making money"?

Art is fundamentally connected to ethics. All you need ask is "Why is that good?" "Why do you like that?" Eventually you will boil down the persons taste to a statement of what is good and what is bad. But this requires a very analytical mind - Ayn Rand seemed to be able to take art forms back to their fundamentals very quickly. It takes me a while to think about them, I echo the previous sentiments: read The Romantic Manifesto.

Those are philosophies, in a different sense of the word. When we say philosophy, we mean philosophy qua philosophy, as in the study of man and his relationship to reality. Those other things are all what Objectivism would call the "special sciences" - and while they are all based on and corollary to the main philosophical branches, they are not really considered part of the academic philosophical field.

Do you mean to ask, if an aspect of reality were not so - would Objectivism be false? The answer to that is yes. For example, if it was true that A is not A, or that a stone could be all green and all brown at the same time, that man had no means of observing nature etc. Then Objectivism would not be appropriate. Then again, neither would any philosophy... or any thought or invention for that matter. Nothing in *this* reality (which, of course, is the only reality) refutes Objectivism - because Objectivism is a system designed for man around reality. You might as well ask "If 2 did not equal 2, would 2 + 2 = 4"

I'm pleased to announce that my new project, The Prometheus Initiative, is able to start accepting requests for free copies of Ayn Rand's novels in the UK. The Prometheus Initiative was set up by myself to promote the study of Ayn Rand in the UK. Website This is probably the biggest piece of Objectivist activism I've ever done, and it has been a rewarding experience so far.

Right, the context is Britain. I live there. Never in my life have I witnessed, in popular culture, applause for something that is legitimately valuable and life-affirming. Until I saw this on television.

I wouldn't - they are tools of various movements. The Libertarian party is the tool, and embodiment, of a single movement.

Do you mean like, computer games? I think JMeganSnow from this forum might be a good contact.

When you vote for the lesser evil, you are *not* supporting the candidate. You are voting against, rather than for. Peikoff did not advise any Objectivists to join in Obama's campaign, or to start advocating his ideas. Libertarians, on the other hand, are a purely political movement, they have no philosophical underpinnings and this is why the movement is such a mess. Getting votes is the be-all and end-all of Libertarian movements: voting for Libertarians is actually sanctioning them. It is not yet time for politics. We need to advocate our philosophical and political ideas to the point where they are widely accepted until we can even think about getting the right people into office. The Objectivist strategy is to create a cultural revolution - the Libertarian solution is to try and convince the populace of a myriad of floating abstractions to worm their way into office. The two are mutually exclusive, but things are made even murkier by the fact that on the surface, us and the libertarians appear to have similar goals (free markets, etc.) For this reason, we cannot lend their movements any help whatsoever. Even if through some near-impossibility somebody like Ron Paul was elected as President, we might be more free temporarily, but without the right philosophy being widely accepted this would soon be reverted. "Hey, there's lots of wealth now, lets distribute it. Why not?" "Free markets? We tried those when Ron Paul was president, they didn't work" The capitalist movement would be set back by many years if we let the Libertarians dominate it.

Hear Hear.

I've recently ordered a few hundred WIJG pins/badges for The Prometheus Initiative