xfireworksx

i joined mensa when i was 16 due to a teacher setting me up to it, and i didn't renew my membership because it wasn't doing anything for me. i met people through mensa, but not through going out to the group parties - when people who lived near me had questions, they'd contact my email address through the webpage. i wouldn't advocate joining, unless you want to pad your c.v. or for bragging rights. i don't think the organization is really keeping to the lofty objectives it had started with! and thanks for the interesting perspectives on intelligence & objectivism!

the political science and history specialist program. what program are you taking at ryerson? i have a friend in film and another couple in journalism there.

good point. in canada, the straight edge thing doesn't seem to have this air of total irrationality attached to it. it's not about being against something or being better than everyone else, it's about self-preservation and rationality as i see it. i have upheld logical principles all my life and it coincided with the name "straight edge" as i found it... but as i have seen from your responses, i must be a rare sort to think this way. i do listen to some of the music that is associated... but i also listen to jazz and classical and a thousand other varieties. this ideology [as i and many others see it and practice it] has nothing to do with inking/carving up your skin, or gratuitous violence, or any kind of anger and hatred towards the world. many straight edge kids fight amongst themselves about what is straight edge and what isn't, and the general consensus returns to the fact that it's your personal decision of what you consider edge. i know that many people don't know what they're doing and are following a crowd in order to find meaning. i don't think that by being straight edge i should be associated with anything other than those basic sensical principles. also, it's easier shorthand at a party. if people ask why i'm straight edge, i tell them what i posted in my first post. i find it strange that as soon as i attached the words "straight edge" to what i'd posted, people didn't seem to like what i'd written. to respond to elle - i was more referring to the general principles, not the sad scene that has grown up around the lifestyle. i stay straight edge because i'm rational, not because i'm repressed or i need friends. i can understand that some of you see objectivism in such a way that drinking is still a part of leisure. i'm supposing that the rest of you never associated abstinence with objectivism? // in response to another query, i am vegan, but more for health reasons [i'm allergic to eggs and milk] than political ones. however, if you knew where your food was coming from, you might be a little more hesitant to gobble up those cheeseburgers.

i am straight-edge and have been for my entire life. for those of you that don't know it, it's a philosophy of abstaining from drinking, smoking, drugs and promiscuous sex [and some groups add on other peripheral things, but that's the guts of it]. i have kept this lifestyle because i believe in its inherent rationality - that i don't want to put something into my system that would impair my ability to make rational judgements in any way. also, i don't want to cause harm to the only thing that can get me anywhere in life - my physical self. i was curious as to whether other individuals here also abstain from the above activities, and if not, why not?

olleh my name is jasmine, i'm 20 and a student at the university of toronto. i hope to find some decent discussion for once. it's nice to have a kind of haven of logic in a world very bent on touchy-feely discussion of facts. i'm currently re-reading atlas shrugged for the millionth time, and it's interesting to see how my views on the book have changed over time. i'm also curious as to how many objectivists here are members of mensa or other high-intelligence societies. are intelligent people more likely to be drawn to objectivism? anyway, hello.