bluecherry

You can't force enough people to vote for somebody good though. You can't change enough of their minds over night either. Right now, a truly good person just cannot win any major election. That's just a plain old fact. It's why Objectivists are currently focusing on educating people and not trying to win elections already. Take the following conditions: 1) only bad people stand a chance at winning and you know that it's only a question of type and quantity of force being initiated rather than initiation of force v. no initiation of force 2) one or more of the realistic options is looking decidedly worse than the other(s) for initiating force against you and your values 3) it looks like the lesser bad one(s) is/are not easily in the lead to win over the worse one(s). In this case, I think the same logic applies as in the following scenario: Somebody kidnapped you, tied you up, and then told you to pick between being punched or disemboweled. If you don't pick, and fast, they're going to just flip a coin. They won't be talked out of it and you can't move to just escape. Picking being punched wouldn't be a sanction of force. It's just defending yourself as best as you can at the time. It's patently against your self interest to just allow greater force to be initiated against you, especially if it's likely to be large and long term.

Don't get too caught up in beating up on yourself. The important thing is you haven't done anything really irreparable, you've learned and now you're going to do better in the future. Nobody is born knowing it all, even in ethics. We all have to learn these things and not everybody will learn them at the same time or same pace or same way. Consider too that you're much better off than James in that you're figuring this out just as you're ceasing to be a kid anymore, people by nature with a lot to learn about being a person who thus can be expected to not do and be so great at stuff, whereas James made it to around midlife and still was a louse. I never personally identified with James because I'd come to many of the same ethical and other philosophical conclusions in Atlas Shrugged before I read the book and was already trying to live according to such, but there are definitely plenty of people around here who have had similar experiences as you when they first read this stuff. I can't remember who it was, but I'd swear I've seen somebody around specifically cite James as who they thought they were shamefully similar to too. Peter Keating is another character from one of Rand's other novels that people have often said they thought they had been far too akin to after reading the book he was in. It's far from unprecedented for somebody to realize after reading this stuff that they want to make significant changes to how they conduct themselves.

*points up* I posted something too . . .

" The truth is that for every person that 'makes it', there are at least one or more other people who are equally talented who get stuck in long term unemployment or in dead end McJobs that do not pay enough to live on. I've seen it time and time again. And yet I see Objectivism teaching its followers to scoff at these people when the reality is that there is simply not enough in the world in terms of natural resources and global atmospheric carbon capacity for everybody, no matter how talented, to live the lifestyle of a Hank Rearden or even a contemporary middle class American." Crucial distinction to be made - you cite things you've witnessed "time and time again" as evidence that Objectivist capitalistic economic systems result in equally capable people having vastly different outcomes, some thriving, some struggling to barely get by. However, what you've witnessed has taken place in an economic system FAR from the capitalism espoused by Objectivism. This is a mixed economy with heavy government meddling. I agree that lots of very capable people have gotten rather unjustly screwed and I feel badly for those many individuals, but I strongly disagree with you about the source of this injustice. The problem is government meddling in the economy. Problems in the economy leading good people to bad living conditions are pretty well proportional to just how much the government meddles in the economy. Being so far from capitalism, I think it's hard to say we've shown in a capitalistic system we just still wouldn't have enough resources for everybody to live comfortably. You may argue eventually some things will have to run out, but left free, people come up with new sources and better replacements anyway. Seriously, if government doesn't get in the way, mining asteroids and such for more resources is already looking feasible in the foreseeable future, crops are being engineered to produce more, I'd bet an eyeball we mass produce synthetic oil and natural gas or find a superior replacement long before those run out. (Have you read Atlas Shrugged? Far from encouraging just blindly hating on the poor, Rand has a main, rich protagonist at one point give a random homeless stranger some food and warm safe passage with her in her personal car on the train and she talks with him. Not to mention Cheryl and many other protagonists living in pretty poor conditions for a long time.)

I would ask if your grade for this paper is dependent on agreeing with the premises of the questions. Also, "stakeholder" is generally a junk term used to denote anybody who is in any way feasibly impacted by or for whatever reason cares about what a business does. They don't have to be involved in the business itself at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_(corporate)

I await the indignant outcry when this either doesn't come to pass or many more low level jobs vanish as a result.

This is a nutshell version of things. There are three basic categories we contend exist in theories of knowledge and values: subjective, objective, and intrinsic. In this context: Subjective refers to the notion that these things are determined entirely "inside" by consciousness with no input from the "outside" reality. Intrinsic refers to the notion that these things are determined entirely by the "outside" reality with no input from "inside" by consciousness. Objective refers to the notion that these things are determined by a particular type of interaction between the "outside" reality and "inside" consciousness - namely, the senses collect data from the outside world to present to consciousness and then reason is applied to interpreting this data, identifying and integrating it, by consciousness. Most people and ideologies end up pulling from multiple categories at different times and topics, not just one. Objectivism regards only the objective as valid though. Keep in mind however that we regard context as extremely important and that there are some possible differences among people which we would consider to be part of context that need to be accounted for when it comes to making values related determinations. Some related material: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/subjectivism.html http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/intrinsic_theory_of_values.html http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/objective_theory_of_values.html http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/objectivity.html If you'd like some examples of things that fit the categories, just let me know.

Hello. It's nice to meet you.

This is relevant to something I was thinking about recently. When I first joined this forum I was dismayed and baffled at the trend of the most competent members posting very rarely or already having vanished entirely, even though I was aware of a number of them definitely still being supportive of Objectivism and interested in things related to it. If it was just a couple people for a while, I would think people probably were just busy. It was too many people for too long to seem likely that was the case though. The other day, I was watching something crappy. (I do have a point, bear with me here for a moment.) A character was looking for a new group to learn about something from which she had recently started studying. To get accepted to this group, she had to demonstrate having some level of knowledge and skill established on the subject first. She did her demonstration, but it turned out that what she demonstrated was already well above what the other people in that group knew and could do. She was no longer interested in this group, but they asked her to stay and teach them how to do what she had just done. She told them basically that she had come there to learn, not to teach, and marched off. My thoughts at this were, "Yeah, screw teaching. Teaching sucks." It occurred to me that that might have a lot to do with the trend I mentioned earlier: we came here to learn, not to teach. Learning is a lot more fun and less work than teaching, especially in philosophy, assuming we're not talking about formal settings with tons of tests and papers and projects involved. Being a student as opposed to a teacher in philosophy mostly involves reading and asking questions when you don't understand something while a teacher does most of the writing and answering of stuff that is old news to them. Teaching obviously can be very beneficial for the teacher too, but in a less direct and less guaranteed way. So, I think when people get to where they feel like they're doing more teaching than learning, they often get pickier about when, where, how, and who they'll teach, aiming to get the most bang for their buck out of their teaching efforts. As it relates to the main thread issue, that may mean less posting in general due to switching from posting abundantly while learning to more sparsely while teaching, but also when they do teach, people may start tending toward teaching (usually it just so happens to take place in private) people they personally know because those people have a greater impact on their lives and/or seeking public platforms that reach as many people as they possibly can. This forum is public and does come up prominently if people search online for places to discuss Objectivism, but many threads and topics are by a small number of strangers and are closely related to topics which have already been discussed pretty thoroughly elsewhere on the forum before. People looking on the forum probably can just go check those older threads instead of seeing posts in the new thread, so those new threads are likely to get less traffic, to have less impact.

Should? Yes. However, "should" doesn't necessarily mean they do. Furthermore, I'm talking though about a case where "it's not ok/right to force people to make payments equally to everybody" is part of their moral values. Forcing people to comply with your moral standards isn't the only way to act on them and can go against them if as part of their morals somebody doesn't regard the particular ends as justifying any means. Objectivists for example of course regard lots of things as immoral and even unjust that we don't seek to use force against. You can refuse to deal with people in response to immorality as one non-force based way to act on moral values when/if one doesn't find force justified.

If both of you could please get explicit on what premises may be wrong (and why you suggest that) and why the premises aren't wrong that would be a lot more productive.

"Anyways, this assertion that every human , no matter in what profession, is of equal value, leads to a marxist society at the end." Eh . . . Only if it was also believed that it's ok/right to force people to make payments based upon this. Believing something is right or wrong doesn't always necessarily entail a belief that it's something one may rightfully go force others to follow through on. Also, in general to this topic, 1) remember that value is contextual. (Something/someone is of some particular value to some particular party for some particular end. Value of something/somebody can be different to different people and at different times under different circumstances it can vary for the same person too.) 2) There's more than one way a person can provide value and more than one way value can be paid for. (Material value is one, immaterial value is another. Usually, but not always, you pay for material with material and immaterial with immaterial. Neither type of value alone can be seen as representative of a person's over-all value nor necessarily representative of how much somebody over-all value's another person.)

I'd like to throw in my two cents, but I'm a little unclear on exactly what is being disputed here. What are the alternatives? What as opposed to what else? I did read everything, but some of the objections and counters being made were kind of vague and I'm not sure what statements they were made in reference to.

Yeah, this guy is really a failure as an example of capitalism. It seems since before people started talking about that price increase, this guy was already being investigated for fraud with past companies he was in charge of, basically using one company to pay off what was owed to the last company repeatedly, like getting new credit cards to pay off old credit cards and then another one to pay off that one. If these charges are true, he's not only trying to use bad laws to make money, he's got a history of fraud and failure to actually successfully run a business to boot.

"Neither dogs nor babies have the faculty of reason . . ." Small point about your wording. Babies can't reason due to lacking sufficient information - they haven't had time and experience to really grasp what would be necessary to do reasoning. Their brains may still be in the process of some noteworthy development, but as far as the term "faculty of reason" is generally used in Objectivism, babies do have it. Babies definitely have some kind of thoughts too, and dogs I think too, they're just probably not very well formed and precise with lots of concepts involved.

". . . there are girls in college who will not go out with you if they find out you haven't had a girlfriend before." Hold on. I have never heard of this happening before ever, that somebody would be very interested right up until they find out a person hasn't been in a relationship before and then completely change course. Do you have any proof of this being more than just one or two people who do this? It's very common for people to get to college without having had a romantic relationship before, far from some unfathomable oddity that would get one branded as undateable. Getting to where you can comfortably communicate with people of the sort you are romantically attracted to is a good idea and can make a significant difference in one's ability to attain a romantic relationship, but actually having had a relationship before or not won't make a difference.

epistemologue: You quoted both Eiuol and me mentioning that you gave no specifics about what these male versus female modes/effects would be, including that that was the only point you quoted by Eiuol, and yet you still left those things unspecified. We've mentioned specific examples of how/why other physical aspects ("is") lead to various "oughts" for a human being who has chosen to live. Our examples are "proof of concept" for a physical "is" leading to a moral "ought", but they also show that a specific "is" can't lead to just any old "ought" of course. I've cited some larger impact physical aspects in my last post, like having arms and being solid rather than liquid or gas in addition to some smaller ones like ear size or if one has an appendix. The larger ones can be shown to impact career goals too, but still in specific ways that are pretty clear why they are what they are. Baseball pitcher is probably out of the question without arms as the job requires throwing a ball with arms. Being solid also means we can't reasonably expect to make a living doing anything that would involve squeezing ourselves through a pinhole. We don't find anybody arguing for emphasizing even these bigger, more pervasive aspects of our "form" though in our personality or in our life in ways that can't be demonstrated as a matter of impossibility or potentially maiming or killing us. Even the relatively large and pervasive parts of our "form" don't become applicable or meriting emphasis just everywhere and anywhere all the time willy-nilly. Can you explain why one's sex would be an exception to this or can you make a case for why and how it is relevant and meriting emphasis in each of the specific areas you've cited earlier? ("what should my goals be", "how should I develop my character", "what kind of relationships should I pursue", "what kind of career should I pursue", "what kind of person should I become", "how should I behave in social situations", "what kind of life should I live")

I don't like the "unread content" thing they replaced the "new content" page with. >:[

Actual humans are composing these messages, so I don't think it's completely unreasonable to look at them with that in mind. People often don't state outright everything they're trying to communicate and other things make it clearer what the whole message is. The lack of that additional context, like tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language make it easier to get the message misunderstood. And this is a large part of why I use emoticons so much.

"- In 'The Objectivist Ethics' Rand describes the fundamental principle of morality as 'life as the standard of value', and this principle is based on the nature of man - specifically his fundamental nature as a living organism. - Rand then goes beyond this most fundamental aspect of man's nature - she specifically says it's not strictly man's physical survival as a biological organism, but rather the standard of life *qua man*. For example, she identifies another defining aspect of his nature, this one the most differentiating, his rationality, as also being essential to the standard of morality: 'Man’s survival qua man' means the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan—in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice." Yup. All fine and good here. Steady as she goes. "- In general, the principles of morality - the normative standards to which our volition is measured - follow from the form of man - the nature of his identity. Ethical principles follow from, and emphasize, man's form, identity, and metaphysically given nature." Now you're starting to veer off course. I don't recall "form" as such being emphasized back in the ethics, especially not as separate from metaphysically given nature and identity. I think you probably stuck that in there to start talking about basic functional things that have a huge, very pervasive impact (like our "form" including arms and legs and eyes and ears and being solid as opposed to liquid or gas) and then shift to asserting that everything that is part of our form must be of really big, pervasive impact. "- As a fundamental aspect of human nature and identity, this includes one's sex." Yup, looks like I was right. I've said before "is implies ought" is true. One's sexual organs do imply oughts. Those oughts include though answers to things like, "Urologist or gynecologist?" and, "Would it likely be a disaster if I tried to pee while standing?" The only obvious way people's sex gets near being "fundamental" to human nature was that until very recently, one fertile male and one fertile female were required to combine certain cells in order to make another new human. Humanity continuing depended on it. On an individual level though, that's more or less just like a shopping list to keep in mind if one wants to make a baby, or a warning of what to be careful about if one doesn't want to. Last I heard, two females could now make another female baby too, but that would involve a lot more expense and hassle to accomplish. You haven't given any reason for one's sex to imply very pervasive things for a person's life and personality rather than much more specific, delimited things. One's hair color, ear size, possession or lack of an appendix are all part of our form too and as such have at least some implication for us, but nobody is arguing they should form a cornerstone of our personality and such. This also says nothing about what would even constitute "masculine" and "feminine" exactly either beyond a very unclear, unspecific "man stuff" and "woman stuff", but perhaps first you wanted to establish them mattering before saying what they actually are.

That's still a grand total of 11 accidents all together, not a very solid sample size yet. It doesn't give any obvious reasons for people to make mistakes driving that result in accidents with those self-driving cars, so combined with the small accident sample size, this still looks like it could easily be a fluke. More data needed to draw any conclusions. I really would be interested though in accident rates with a large number of self-driving cars doing lots of driving together for many miles over a long time.

Hello. *waves* We welcome inquiry about Objectivism from non-Objectivists, so, yup, you should be fine.

Ok. That's what I wanted to know. Thanks.

My question was about the "topic feed" section on the main forum page.

Does the topics section show recently posted in threads or just newly created threads though?