Pokarrin

I always interpreted this passage as indicating his aversion to facing the truth John Galt had already accepted; he sensed that if he consciously identified the motive behind the bill, it would require him to abandon his work just as Galt had, and he wasn't yet ready to make that leap.

If you are building a tennis ball launcher that uses an actual tennis racket to launch the ball, you would be able, using only Newtonian physics, to state with absolute certainty how long to make the delay between dropping the ball and swinging the racket. If you were trying to determine the position of a satellite by triangulation with its radio frequency signal, you might need to make an adjustment in your calculations to account for relativity, depending on the purpose for which you are locating the satellite. No action is taken, or measurement is made, without a purpose, and that purpose is what determines the context. In the first example, your calculations are off by so slight a margin as to be irrelevant, since variations in the operation of the mechanism itself would obviate the need to correct them. In this context, Newtonian physics gives exactly the precision you need, and your certainty is absolute, contextually.

Why do you assume any distinction here? They both want to control our thoughts and our actions, and for the same reason: To forcibly impose their illusions on the rest of humanity in the false belief that they can thereby escape the consequences of those illusions. The secular left demands we pretend that anti-man environmentalism and egalitarian economics make sense, while the religious right demands we abandon sense altogether in favor of mindless devotion to god and country.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...9051303014.html

What I found most interesting was the comments (16 of them at the time of my reading); not one comment agreed with the author, in fact they wre all supportive of Objectivism. If this is the kind of readership The Washington Times attracts, I might consider getting a subscription for my Kindle.

Is anyone here familiar with the various works of Alvin and Heidi Toffler? My grandfather recently sent me their book War and Anti-War, and, while I found their reasoning somewhat unscientific, I'm not sure that all of their conclusions are completely wrong. Basically, I'm trying to determine if it would be worth my time and money to acquire one of their earlier works, such as Future Shock or The Third Wave. Does their Three Wave theory of the progress of civilization actually hold up under any scrutiny? Is their analysis of the long-term effects of a Third Wave 'revolution' reasonable? My only purpose in reading these books would be to deepen my own understanding of political and economic principles. Any rational, informed analysis is welcome.

Patrick Stewart I think the reason it's hard to remember is because the character is French, but the actor is English.

A benevolent universe premise holds that reality is and has been proven to be comprehensible and predictable, and that the way to improve your happiness is to improve your understanding of reality. An idea, then, is an attempt to understand reality, and it matters because reality can be understood. The only context in which ideas would not matter would be if reality itself were subject to arbitrary changes which would invalidate and frustrate any attempt to understand it, or if reality were simply unobservable. A malevolent universe premise, on the other hand, is one in which the nature of reality is unpredictable and incomprehensible, and we are therefore doomed to failure and unhappiness because we have no power to improve ourselves or our lives. This premise is common to religious metaphysics, in which there is always a higher power that controls reality and is either indifferent or hostile to all those who do not placate that power with their uncritical faith. A similar premise can be found in Kant's noumenal/phenomenal reality dichotomy, in which the phenomenal world, the one we can see, is a poor reflection of the noumenal world which is the true reality, and which is ultimately incomprehensible because it cannot be directly observed.

If it's a virtue, it's not weakness. If you're talking about fear of dying, that can indeed be a virtue, but you need to be sure you've properly defined what 'living' is.

A proper military is not an altruistic organization. It's proper function is to kill people and break their stuff, in order to protect the rights of the citizens of the country it is defending. The fact that many governments use their military for altruistic purposes does not change that. It is in your own best interest to have a military protecting your rights, and if you find you have an aptitude for and interest in the role you play for the military, you should continue to do it so long as it continues to serve your own long-term self-interest. I understand why you think the military is altruistic; one of the Core Values of the U.S. Air Force, in which I serve, is Service Before Self, and I'm sure the other branches have similar silliness in their own official ethics. In my own case, I see Service Before Self as implying a false dichotomy; I cannot perform the service I do without at the same time serving my own self-interest. Military service does not require altruism and I do not practice it at work.

I am no more responsible for compromising principles by paying taxes than if I hand over my wallet to a mugger; in both cases, the threat of force is used to take something from me that I didn't choose to give. I have no freedom to choose a moral course, therefore a moral judgment of my action is meaningless. A moral judgment could be made if I went to the mugger (before he approached me) and offered him a part of my money in exchange for his not threatening me, or if I voluntarily choose to pay more taxes than I am required to by law, in the hope that the government would then not raise my taxes. The difference is whether a rational choice is available; in the presence of a threat to my life and/or liberty, it is not, and I must choose whichever evil I believe is least harmful to me.

It's a logically consistent result of the influence of Pragmatism in popular culture; since we can't know what the long-term results of our actions will be, go for the short-term gains. A movie about successful thieves reinforces that philosophy, making those who hold it feel better about themselves. Also, casting those stolen from as having acquired their wealth dishonestly reinforces the class warfare ideology so dear to too many Americans.

Now you're dropping the context. The line is drawn according to my best judgment in each situation as to what best serves my own self-interest. I might very well save someone I knew to be a convicted murderer if he had served his sentence and learned to live as a productive member of society (maybe he read Atlas Shrugged in prison). If he just finished killing someone and I saw him slip, bumb his head, and fall unconscious into a pool, I would probably just shrug and call the police. If he killed someone important to me, I might throw a rock at him just to be safe.

To begin with, whether or not someone will find out about it ought to be irrelevant; you have no responsibility to do so. If we're assuming minimal risk or loss to myself, I absolutely would save this Speaker Who Shall Remain Nameless, if for no other reason than that it might lead to a conversation between us in which I could try to influence the SWSRN somewhat, though I am well aware of the probable futility of such action. Also, the martyr phenomenon should be considered; what if, in a fit of emotion, a Speaker worse than the SWSRN were appointed, and a congressperson worse than the previous one were elected to fill the vacant seat? That would be a net loss for all involved. As a matter of principle, it is better to save a life than allow a death, so long as the risk to oneself is minimal.

Not if you have been forced into the position of having no affordable health care available except that which the government provides. You cannot be expected to sacrifice your life for a code of ethics intended to help you live successfully. To clarify, I don't mean forced in the sense that your employer doesn't pay you enough, I mean forced in the sense that the government has regulated any rational means of providing healthcare out of existence. If the government has made itself the only provider of food, or made private food production prohibitively expensive, the moral choice is not to starve (though you will anyway if the government is in charge). You are not responsible for the government's decision to steal from the productive, and have little power to stop it.

Yaron Brook http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PcH8m2WozUin which he addressed the subject of government regulators like the FDA. He stated, as I recall, that one of the problems with government regulation in the market is that it accustoms the citizenry to trusting the government agency's judgment instead of their own, thereby distorting the market in favor of the less quality-oriented companies who can simply point to their certification or rating as proof that they have a good product. I think we have a similar problem with credit card companies; we know that the financial industry is heavily regulated, and tend to equate that with quality of service, despite the fact that even a cursory reading of the TOS often reveals terms many people would not be willing to accept. That's the reason I have never had a credit card and never plan to. What needs to be understood is that the government cannot make financial (or any) choices for us; the individuals in the FTC, SEC, FDIC and whatever other acronymical animals are pretending to safeguard our financial future simply don't have and can't have sufficient knowledge to decide for us what terms should be acceptable, even if they really did have each of our best interests at heart, which is by no means a certainty.

I have often been told by non-Objectivists who have read some of Ayn Rand's fiction that her characters and dialogue are not particularly believable. This story thus struck me as something of a vindication for the fact that I disagree with that assessment, particularly considering this gem: I could almost believe Assemblyman Bing had read Atlas Shrugged and drawn precisely the opposite conclusion he should have.

I might worry then about implicitly accepting the rationale of combining politics and economics, though I agree that in the present context they are in fact inextricably linked. You would have to be careful whenever you use the term to state your preference for the separation of the two.

I think it is more useful to describe a crisis in terms of its effects than its causes; both because it is more accurately descriptive and because a particular effect can have multiple contributing causes, and vice versa. For instance, the Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages was exacerbated by the poor hygeine standards of the time, but it was called the Black Death instead of the Hygeine Crisis, as poor hygeine can also have many other effects that vary in severity, and also was not the only contributing factor, rendering the appellation less meaningful and accurate. We should probably just content ourselves with 'economic crisis' and go on to describe political ineptitude and general confusion regarding the science of economics as contributing causes.

Tara Smith explains it quite well in this lecture. The idea is that a lack of certainty about causation requires only short-term goals. The lack of certainty stems from a belief that unexpected events prove conclusively that no predictions about the future can be valid, since the unexpected event was by definition a failure to predict the future. They will generally concede that predicting the action of gravity on a dropped object in the immediate future is a safe bet, but they would still see it as a bet, rather than the operation of a known principle of physics. That's my best understanding so far of pragmatism, and I may well have gotten some of it wrong.

This is the best news I've heard all day; at least we're being attacked by someone who is completely irrational, rather than someone who is kinda sorta rational about some things. Ironically, when I looked at the article, the Google ad at the bottom was for The Objective Standard.

I'm all alone myself, though my sons will be Objectivist if I have any say in the matter.

I think that would depend on the context within which you are asking the question; if you intend to implement a gold standard, you would definitely have to know how many dollars there are in the world (physical and electronic) in order to determine a rational exchange rate. If you just want to determine what the current purchasing power of a dollar is within a single country, however, the number of dollars tied up in accounts and investments in other countries would tend to raise that number (at least temporarily). I'm sure somone else could give a more complete explanation, but that is my best current understanding.

I just finished reading the last chapter of my textbook for a Comparative Religions class I'm taking (it seemed like a good idea at the time). It was full of some of the most ridiculous collectivist crap I've ever encountered, an unholy alliance of the Religious Right and the Bleeding-Heart, Liberal Left at their respective worst. I actually felt physically ill reading it. I don't know if that counts as an emotion or not, but that's what I felt.

A rational businessman understands that the presence of other businesses in his area, even those that compete directly with his, increase the total amount of wealth in that area, which can only be good for business. In the event that the businessman finds a lower relative demand for his particular product because of increased supply, he will know that he must either improve his product, lower its cost, or make something else. In any of those cases, if he does it right, his business has improved, and he will continue to make money. If he instead seeks to use government intervention to legislate his competitors out of business, he will have placed control of his means of production in the fickle hands of that government, and cannot succeed long-term. The only other way for him to gain a monopoly would be for him to make a product so good and so cheaply that no one is able to compete, and he must then be constantly on his guard against a new competitor coming along with a more efficient process or a better product, which will inevitably happen in a free market. Gaining that monopoly, then, does not materially change the requirements of running a successful business, so there's no particular reason for a businessman to seek one for its own sake. A monopoly might be the result of running a business extaordinarily well, but under no circumstances should it be the goal of a business. That's not to say there aren't or haven't been businessmen who seek to gain a monopoly, but those who do are attempting to put effect before cause.