bluecherry

This link http://old.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28856&p=338187 seems to be broken. Also, when not logged in I can't seem to locate the link for the "new content" page. The design looks a little different once I sign in, possibly because before I had it set up on my account to keep the old blue layout (the colors/background I have upon sign in right now are similar to those old ones), so the "new content" link is prominently displayed at the top right upon signing in for me while not there before logged out.

If you aren't especially familiar with various logical fallacies yet, getting to know them better may be useful. Tons of bad arguments ultimately rest on these basic errors and recognizing them being employed can quickly cut through the nonsense.

". . . it seems in his interest to take a flat rate as opposed to nothing. However, for reasons I’m unsure of, I still expect him to say no. And even though as an Objectivist, I have no right to resent him for charging for his service or being profit-driven, I find myself doing so anyway." It sounds like you expect him to irrationally cause a lose/lose situation here. That such a belief would result in resenting that doctor makes sense. ". . .unless I misunderstand the effort and expense required on his part to treat multiple joints . . ." Finding out that, what the additional costs to him are, or if he does take your offer though I bet would make the resentment go away. If it didn't, then there might be some irrational idea behind the emotion.

No problem.

I don't know about the baby. My hypothesis though is that crying is a response to any sufficiently strong emotion, serving as a bit of a release valve when an emotion starts to get kind of overwhelming. You feel a bit calmer after crying. Having a fairly quick way to calm down a bit could be helpful to keep one more able to function. Even if what you're feeling is good, back when the crying response developed, it was likely more important to be alert and prepared to respond to sudden threats at any time. That crying wound up being heavily associated with sadness to the point that crying when happy is seen as paradoxical is itself a little sad in its implications. As for why kids aren't known to cry when happy, some guesses: they haven't developed as much in the way of long term concerns as adults yet, having fewer freedoms and responsibilities, so when something good happens for them they tend to have fewer other concerns weighing on them in the background at the time, but the good thing itself doesn't have as much of an impact on their life as some things can for adults. In short, their happiness is likely undiluted, but not able to get as intense.

I think there's sort of two groups with two problems. One group is just not open to the possibility that something that is so opposite so many mainstream values could be correct. The other group is much more open to the possibility. There's little to no hope of changing the minds of members of the first group any time soon. Even if they get some accurate information and don't come into things having ever heard of Objectivism before, they'll quickly stop giving Objectivism a fair hearing. The second group with some accurate information will give Objectivism a fair hearing. However, members of the first group who hear of Objectivism first before some members of the second group can make trouble by feeding an inaccurate picture of Objectivism to those members of the second group.

They hurt themselves, but that fact doesn't make them incapable of hurting others at the same time. Stabbing a stranger for kicks would be bad for the stabber, but obviously it would also be bad for the person who got stabbed. True as Hank's quote is, we're talking about people who probably aren't familiar with it. A consequence not known to be coming from an action doesn't serve well as a deterrent to that action. I don't think anything in that article could ultimately doom Objectivism in particular, just that it could make things harder and slow progress down.

The trouble is that people don't always know that there is stuff they don't know. They often don't know that there's much more involved and what little they were told could have been wildly misrepresented. I think philosophies are something more prone to this happening than, say, math or plumbing or foreign languages. Because of this, people may never pursue Objectivism who otherwise would have because they have received information that shows Objectivism to be something with such huge, glaring contradictions and shoddy, minimal work in creating it. It looks like a big waste of time to look into something that is obviously wrong and not in a position of power where it could pose a threat to you either. The problem isn't that people are expressing negative feelings and disagreement with Objectivism, it's that they are not accurately presenting it.

Would it not be possible to start exploring these other subjects without quitting your current business degree pursuit? If you can't start exploring other stuff without stopping pursuit of the business degree, could you perhaps take a semester off while leaving open the possibility to go back to pursuing the degree?

*scratches head* Was that big OPAR quote and the part after it always there? I feel nigh on blind to have missed it before. The question after the OPAR quote deals with a substantially different motive for suicide than the motive given in the section before the big quote. The third world country thing, specifics of an individual case would be necessary to say whether or not somebody was really in that hopeless of a situation or not that it would make sense to quit living. "That's begging the question. The whole point of the thread is: should we want to live of die?" I don't think that is the point of the thread. The first section looks to be about somebody who wants to live, that being the reason to have a negative emotional response to the notion of it ending, so we're already beyond the point of determining wanting to live or not. Wanting to live or not also has no "should"s though anyway because "should" is a moral issue and we can't form moral guidelines for somebody until and unless they've already decided they want live since morality is built upon what to do if you want to live. "The argument isn't that people live in terror because they don't want to die, it's that they live in terror because they fear death. You can fear things you want." Why fear death if they don't oppose dying? ". . . is moral to the extent that it doesn't represent an aggression against anyone else." The discussion related to this, in a nut shell, the problem with the line is that aggression against others is not the only immoral thing.

   "It's just bringing right away exactly what one doesn't want and could probably avoid for a long time." That's why it's an illogical response.

I was speaking with a context in mind of the contents of the first post. In that post, the only reason given for wanting to die was the fear of dying. My post is not about suicide in general, just about suicide in relation to this one particular motive. A case of, say, somebody who wants to kill themselves due to an incurable, constant, extreme physical pain disorder is an altogether different matter.

Killing oneself because one is afraid of dying just sounds absurd. It's just bringing right away exactly what one doesn't want and could probably avoid for a long time. It's completely backwards. If one doesn't want to die, even though it is inevitable, the logical response is to avoid it as best as one can for as long as one can. One will die eventually, infinite life isn't an option, but any and all time living is something and something is always more than nothing.

"people who don't even believe that their children actually exist except as some kind of cluster mind-share" Is that the object/percept thread or a different one? I only noticed children mentioned on the first page of that thread without seeing anything like what you mentioned in the posts with children in them.

As far as complexity goes with consciousness, I think a certain amount is necessary, but not sufficient. What we have right now in mechanical things aiming toward simulating conscious things is too simple to make a real consciousness. However, the question is if any of those things have the right basic approach such that expanding upon them enough could ever succeed in making a real consciousness.

"Predictability implies a factor of the "unknown". Are you surprised to discover that each time you add 1+1 that it equals 2?" "Are you suggesting an absolutely certain form of knowledge (a priori knowledge)?" You two are both confusing me here. "Predictability" doesn't have any such "implication of the 'unknown'" as far as I've ever seen and is pretty much the opposite of surprising. One doesn't need "a prior knowledge" either for certainty, especially not for something like basic addition.

Ok. Just checking.

Point of clarification: ". . . it is the parent's responsibility to see that they get to adulthood (limited only by the parent's ability to do so)." Do you mean to say that there is no moral way for one to opt to cease that role prior to the child reaching adulthood?

"If you had a six-year-old kid and suddenly realized that you'd made a mistake, murder would still be murder (because it's unnecessary and senseless); the moral thing would be to kick them out of the house." I get that you mean killing the kid and raising them to adulthood aren't the only options. However, just kicking a six year old out of the house, (given 1)that said six year old can't just go start supporting themselves being that they are six years old and 2) that the current guardian holds some responsibility for the six year old being in the situation of unable to support themselves and dependent on the guardian) wouldn't be ok. It would be very dangerous to the kid while very unnecessary to quitting the guardianship role. Drop the kid off some place where they can get a new guardian to take over the role.

    Without going so far as to try anything extreme on a suspected mechanical baby like cutting it open, I think so far other more mundane things would give it away as not actually being a baby still. We probably couldn't power it with food. Even if we could clear that hurdle, eventually it would be discovered as an imitation when it failed to grow and develop like humans do.

Accepting the arbitrary unquestioningly and accepting anecdotal evidence unquestioningly aren't the only options. There's good reason "anecdotal evidence" is generally treated with some suspicion. Anecdotal evidence is generally a term used for evidence from others, not what one witnessed first hand. All possible confounding factors of anecdotal evidence: People lie, people don't recall things accurately, people have experiences that are a-typical, people don't well convey what they witnessed, people jump to inaccurate conclusions about what they saw and report those conclusions as exactly what they saw. This is why replication of experiences, multiple identical witness accounts, and other corroborating evidence is important for big things like scientific discovery validation and throwing people in the slammer. Some of these confounding factors apply to things one personally witnesses too, but not all of them. This doesn't mean we have to always just doubt everything, but rather that some things are more prone to involving more factors than we'd see immediately and thus merit some further inspection often before calling the case closed. Things involving large groups of people are often subject to people not recalling all members encountered as well as other particular members and/or witnessing mostly or entirely a-typical members. This kind of mistake has happened in such situations plenty of times before, so it's not coming out of left field to think maybe there could be a similar mistake again here. I think we've probably got enough info that our conclusion that a majority of atheists are politically leftists is sound, but I don't think it would be a bad thing to double check with a really well done poll or something similar if somebody decided to.

"Why are they prone to package deal - is it just most atheists?" It's not that atheists are especially prone to package deals, more so than other groups, it's that people in general currently are prone to it and atheists as a group are just at least not enough of an exception to this susceptibility to keep it from playing a big part in the politics of many of them. I'm not saying either though that this explains all of leftism for all politically left atheists, just that I think it plays a big role in how leftism became/becomes the dominant political position among atheists overall.

Since the focus here is atheists and why they gravitate toward leftism rather than leftism in general's workings and motives, I think a lot of it often comes down to a false dichotomy between package deals. The left and right are two bundles of political positions and motives and treated as the only options. The "right" bundle contains religion, so seemingly the only option available for one looking to get a bundle without religion is the "left" bundle. Embracing Political Bundle Option A (leftism, as a whole) becomes equivalent to rejecting Political Bundle Option B (rightism, as a whole, with its religion in there).

Independence qua virtue is about independence of thought - thinking for yourself, not being physically independent - separated from other living beings. Not human, *a* human. It has DNA of the human species before that and thus can be said to be human, but the same applies to loose hairs, fingernail clippings, lines of cancer cells - they are human (adjective), but not humans (noun). It's not just abortion by a long shot that such reasoning applies to and matters for. Also, fetus serves the same purpose as baby, child, adult and such. They refer to various states of development. If labeling stages of development of animals was somehow by nature an invalid concept, baby wouldn't be the right name while fetus was wrong, they would both be invalid. Do you intend here to argue against abortion from the stand point of the rest of Objectivism and contending that abortion contradicts it? If so, you seem perhaps not very well prepared to do this right now with an assortment of fairly basic errors in the contents of Objectivism in your posts so far. If not, then you likely have much more general disputes with us that would need to be resolved before any real progress could be made on the subject of abortion. So, could this thread just be merged with the abortion thread then?

P.P. should get no "federal" money, yeah, but only under the reasoning that 1) "federal" money right now is stolen money and stolen money should go to nothing but who it was stolen from with no strings attached and 2) even if the government switched to only donation funding, P.P. is outside the scope of government along with the rest of health care services and providers. Under current conditions though, there's a hell of a lot of things I'd prioritize targeting for campaigns to remove "federal" funding from before P.P. though. Why? Because government itself has made so many restrictions adding expenses to abortion providers specifically with the aim of trying to use costs to price them out of existence to get around abortion being legal. I'd need all those restrictions removed before I'd really get behind removing the "federal" funds from P.P. and other abortion providers because right now, stolen money for something that isn't government business (a wrong alone) is being used to fight off regulations against something which isn't government business (also a wrong). They're sort of canceling each other out right now basically. It's basically like a sort of convoluted, indirect form of the principles of self defense where if somebody initiates force, then force is justified to counteract that. It's imperfect and of course I strongly prefer force on both sides just disappear, but having force on just one side I think would be worse. As for if anything is illegal and if they should go to jail, if it is illegal, I think the right answer is "change the law" way before either "throw them in jail" or "screw the rule of law." What's your real point though with the video? "Ew" and "I don't like it" basically aren't very illuminating or arguments at all.