bluecherry

You are attempting to criticize the ethical component of Objectivism because you are saying it is anti-family. However, first you really need to define what constitutes family and why it would be bad to be anti-family. Family is just a genetic fact. Objectivism is not against recognizing the existence of a basic fact like like that. Objectivism also isn't looking to eradicate humanity. We supporters of the philosophy like humanity's potential even I'd say. So Objectivism isn't anti-family in the sense of wanting to end all genetic connections. It takes you a little time to get to it, but it seems what you are really concerned about is Objectivism seeming to reject treating family as a source of some particular unchosen obligations as it is currently treated in human societies. You seem to believe that these unchosen obligations are necessary to the species surviving. Why? You never answer that. You just say basically, "People try harder to keep contact with family." What makes this extra contact effort crucial to the species surviving?

Aside from that argument you needed to make, but didn't, which I thus far consequently can't address, I think a lot of people, Objectivists included, would be able to tell you though that getting a lot of knowledge, shared experiences, and just time in general with somebody increases your investment with them and makes them something of a unique value there versus if it was the same person, but you had little to no history with them. Family, in the way that most people grow up around them in practice today, has that element built into it going for it to make people willing to put more effort into preserving the relationships. This is, however, also possible to do with non-family members too, to just spend a lot of time together until you get a lot of knowledge and shared experiences, so even if one didn't have it with family, it isn't something of a form of connection that is completely lost. For most people though, it is a little harder to get that built up knowledge and experience going all the way back to people sharing in your formative years growing up with people other than relatives. So, there's some unique value in there, something many people would consider to be worth putting a little more effort into preserving. On the other hand, it's also not something anybody would be unable to function without in their lives, that history going back to childhood, especially if we're talking about people who have already had a stable time growing up and are just moving on as adults, not people who are getting bounced around chaotically throughout their childhood.

"Moreover, the incentive to have children in the first place would also be greatly diminished by eradicating the duty to pass on the genes or carry on the family name."
Anybody parenting for that reason, a sense of obligation and a name as opposed to liking children and teaching and stuff like that, is probably going to be a bad parent anyway who is going to raise a kid with a lot of problems. The species is in no way threatened by the loss of bad parents. We're not on the brink of extinction in numbers either to the point that we can't afford to try to be a little more selective in who we have raising kids. I dare say we'd be better off having quality parents only. (Not that I'm advocating here forcefully preventing anybody from raising kids solely due to speculation that their motives will make them harmful to the kids. I'm just talking about speculation, that if people who would have done it only or primarily out of obligation and a name chose not to have kids instead I think this would be a good thing. In practice I think we should still wait until we've got actual evidence of abuse or neglect or imminent threat of such before forcefully taking kids away.)

"Is it not obvious to Objectivists that human beings have and always will place greater irrational obligation on their most inner circle starting with the family, extending out to the community and the nation state?"
Nope, it's not. Don't try to hide behind "it's obvious" as an excuse to not justify a claim as being the case and/or why something is best being a certain way. Actually go on and state your logic and evidence.

There's also the issue that you haven't clarified how any of the logical arguments in Objectivism are incorrect. You've said why you think you would want them to be incorrect, but not why they are incorrect. It's kind of like if you were to say some asteroid's path looks like it's got potential to do major damage and decided to say, "Nuh-uh, the asteroid is wrong," as if that changes anything, as if that made the asteroid cease to exist or move or not be an asteroid or whatever.

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.

Yes.  That is exactly true.  There is no shared identity between particulars.  What is common is only in our heads, hence the Objectivist position that universals are epistemological.  That is quite adequate for what we need universals to do, which is to provide a basis for reasoning about entire categories and for thinking in principles.
The danger of arbitrary subjectivity is avoided by insisting on being able to reduce abstractions back down into the components they had referenced (and in multiple steps as is necessary for abstractions of abstractions) all the down to the perceptual basis.   This is an adequate measure because what is given to us by the senses is not arbitrary or random or created by consciousness but is automatic and deterministic.  
The identity of what exists acts upon the identity of our human senses to cause the human perception of any particular.  Similarities among intrinsic attributes of the objects we perceive are noted in our heads, what exists are merely the attributes in their various degrees. No causal relation between them linking them together outside of our minds is necessary to explain their apparent similarity because 'similarity' is a human judgement about implicit or explicit measurements being within a narrow range, and 'narrow' is another human judgement about relative size.  Judgements are epistemological.  Humans are similar enough in their bodies and perceptual capacities that they make similar judgements about perceptual primitives such as 'red' or more complex judgements such as what is 'a throwable stone'.
The only mystery was the source of human similarity but that has been resolved in principle and in ever growing detail by the study of genetics.  Each individual has his own cause of his body and its capabilities.  There is not a mystic single cause of human nature, nor do we half-remember Plato's 'world of forms'.

"It has never been especially popular at OO.com"
Hey now, that's not true. D: It was really popular early on in my time here. There were times so many of us were in there at once that we crashed the program. I hope the chat gets restored somehow. I haven't used it much lately mostly because there just wasn't much of anybody else around.

"It has never been especially popular at OO.com"
Hey now, that's not true. D: It was really popular early on in my time here. There were times so many of us were in there at once that we crashed the program. I hope the chat gets restored somehow. I haven't used it much lately mostly because there just wasn't much of anybody else around.

Dustin, I wasn't asking if any of your questions/objections in this thread alone you considered to be answered/resolved, I was asking about if you considered that to be the case of *any* of your questions/objections you have raised on this forum in general.
Also, you have in your post there stated your position, but you have not addressed anything any of us have already said to you here about why we contend such a position is incorrect.
You didn't answer my question either about what sources, aside from this forum, you have on Objectivism, or even point me to a place where you already answered that question (which also would have been perfectly acceptable). When I said, "You've made lots of threads here based on questions/objections to Objectivism " - I didn't mean that as an accusation, like it was an inherently bad thing that just should not be done. I was stating it because it was relevant to my later question, asking what, if any, sources you had aside from this forum on Objectivism. Asking this many questions isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it does makes me suspect that you may be attempting to approach learning about or "challenging" this philosophy very badly. You may be jumping into the middle of this philosophy and going about it all higgledy piggledy, not looking into the well made primary or even secondary sources on it that answer the whats and whys pretty thoroughly and systematically. You may instead be asking people to not just reinvent the wheel for you, but reinvent the rocket ship, knowing almost nothing about rockets already yourself, and that they do so random piece by piece with you showing little interest in actually seeing how the pieces fit together and why, or maybe even seeing all the pieces, just seeing how these individual parts aren't making sense to you at first glance and on their own and then saying "This makes no sense! It's all bullshit! No way this thing gets off the ground." This seems like a bad way for you to learn about Objectivism and an even worse way to try to convince anybody who knows Objectivism well that it is incorrect. It's also hugely inefficient on time involved doing it the messy way versus going to the primary or even secondary sources.
As for "echo chambers" and "safe spaces" -- you realize, don't you, that with Objectivists being such a teeny, tiny percentage of the population, we all spend our lives immersed constantly in people and products of contrary beliefs, right? This forum is just one of the few places where we come together with people that DO share our support of this philosophy so that we can actually get some where furthering our discussions of the subject beyond constantly just going over the basics with people who think the philosophy is flat out incorrect, just endlessly rehashing the same basic issues over and over that are already old hat to us, never touching any further or new material. We don't need to have this forum bombarded with people who disagree with us in order to be exposed to other beliefs and the possibility that we are wrong because we already inevitably face those things all the time everywhere else we go pretty much. Our goal here on this forum isn't to *never* be exposed to contrary ideas(something the forum couldn't possibly achieve anyway), its to just have somewhere that actually is about our ideas in the midst of aaaaaaaaaaaaaall the rest that we are exposed to which isn't. And we already do believe in reexaming our own beliefs if ever we come across something which seems to flout them anyway. Having this forum to discuss Objectivism with mostly people who support it is like having a forum for fans of bag pipe music in a world where pretty much everybody hates bag pipe music.

Might I suggest that the issues of context and hierarchy of values are coming into play possibly? Also, I do believe Tara Smith, who generally seems to be a pretty competent person in her writings, has written some potentially relevant things on the rule of law. Does anybody around here happen to have said stuff she's written on the subject? It may prove helpful here in facilitating the discussion to get some input from a clear writer who has already put a lot of thought and effort into the subject.

Dustin, I wasn't asking if any of your questions/objections in this thread alone you considered to be answered/resolved, I was asking about if you considered that to be the case of *any* of your questions/objections you have raised on this forum in general.
Also, you have in your post there stated your position, but you have not addressed anything any of us have already said to you here about why we contend such a position is incorrect.
You didn't answer my question either about what sources, aside from this forum, you have on Objectivism, or even point me to a place where you already answered that question (which also would have been perfectly acceptable). When I said, "You've made lots of threads here based on questions/objections to Objectivism " - I didn't mean that as an accusation, like it was an inherently bad thing that just should not be done. I was stating it because it was relevant to my later question, asking what, if any, sources you had aside from this forum on Objectivism. Asking this many questions isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it does makes me suspect that you may be attempting to approach learning about or "challenging" this philosophy very badly. You may be jumping into the middle of this philosophy and going about it all higgledy piggledy, not looking into the well made primary or even secondary sources on it that answer the whats and whys pretty thoroughly and systematically. You may instead be asking people to not just reinvent the wheel for you, but reinvent the rocket ship, knowing almost nothing about rockets already yourself, and that they do so random piece by piece with you showing little interest in actually seeing how the pieces fit together and why, or maybe even seeing all the pieces, just seeing how these individual parts aren't making sense to you at first glance and on their own and then saying "This makes no sense! It's all bullshit! No way this thing gets off the ground." This seems like a bad way for you to learn about Objectivism and an even worse way to try to convince anybody who knows Objectivism well that it is incorrect. It's also hugely inefficient on time involved doing it the messy way versus going to the primary or even secondary sources.
As for "echo chambers" and "safe spaces" -- you realize, don't you, that with Objectivists being such a teeny, tiny percentage of the population, we all spend our lives immersed constantly in people and products of contrary beliefs, right? This forum is just one of the few places where we come together with people that DO share our support of this philosophy so that we can actually get some where furthering our discussions of the subject beyond constantly just going over the basics with people who think the philosophy is flat out incorrect, just endlessly rehashing the same basic issues over and over that are already old hat to us, never touching any further or new material. We don't need to have this forum bombarded with people who disagree with us in order to be exposed to other beliefs and the possibility that we are wrong because we already inevitably face those things all the time everywhere else we go pretty much. Our goal here on this forum isn't to *never* be exposed to contrary ideas(something the forum couldn't possibly achieve anyway), its to just have somewhere that actually is about our ideas in the midst of aaaaaaaaaaaaaall the rest that we are exposed to which isn't. And we already do believe in reexaming our own beliefs if ever we come across something which seems to flout them anyway. Having this forum to discuss Objectivism with mostly people who support it is like having a forum for fans of bag pipe music in a world where pretty much everybody hates bag pipe music.

Dustin, I wasn't asking if any of your questions/objections in this thread alone you considered to be answered/resolved, I was asking about if you considered that to be the case of *any* of your questions/objections you have raised on this forum in general.
Also, you have in your post there stated your position, but you have not addressed anything any of us have already said to you here about why we contend such a position is incorrect.
You didn't answer my question either about what sources, aside from this forum, you have on Objectivism, or even point me to a place where you already answered that question (which also would have been perfectly acceptable). When I said, "You've made lots of threads here based on questions/objections to Objectivism " - I didn't mean that as an accusation, like it was an inherently bad thing that just should not be done. I was stating it because it was relevant to my later question, asking what, if any, sources you had aside from this forum on Objectivism. Asking this many questions isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it does makes me suspect that you may be attempting to approach learning about or "challenging" this philosophy very badly. You may be jumping into the middle of this philosophy and going about it all higgledy piggledy, not looking into the well made primary or even secondary sources on it that answer the whats and whys pretty thoroughly and systematically. You may instead be asking people to not just reinvent the wheel for you, but reinvent the rocket ship, knowing almost nothing about rockets already yourself, and that they do so random piece by piece with you showing little interest in actually seeing how the pieces fit together and why, or maybe even seeing all the pieces, just seeing how these individual parts aren't making sense to you at first glance and on their own and then saying "This makes no sense! It's all bullshit! No way this thing gets off the ground." This seems like a bad way for you to learn about Objectivism and an even worse way to try to convince anybody who knows Objectivism well that it is incorrect. It's also hugely inefficient on time involved doing it the messy way versus going to the primary or even secondary sources.
As for "echo chambers" and "safe spaces" -- you realize, don't you, that with Objectivists being such a teeny, tiny percentage of the population, we all spend our lives immersed constantly in people and products of contrary beliefs, right? This forum is just one of the few places where we come together with people that DO share our support of this philosophy so that we can actually get some where furthering our discussions of the subject beyond constantly just going over the basics with people who think the philosophy is flat out incorrect, just endlessly rehashing the same basic issues over and over that are already old hat to us, never touching any further or new material. We don't need to have this forum bombarded with people who disagree with us in order to be exposed to other beliefs and the possibility that we are wrong because we already inevitably face those things all the time everywhere else we go pretty much. Our goal here on this forum isn't to *never* be exposed to contrary ideas(something the forum couldn't possibly achieve anyway), its to just have somewhere that actually is about our ideas in the midst of aaaaaaaaaaaaaall the rest that we are exposed to which isn't. And we already do believe in reexaming our own beliefs if ever we come across something which seems to flout them anyway. Having this forum to discuss Objectivism with mostly people who support it is like having a forum for fans of bag pipe music in a world where pretty much everybody hates bag pipe music.

Asking how logic applies to government is a lot like asking how physics applies to government. Governments exist as part of reality. Logic is about how reality functions and therefore applies to reality in general. That's how/why logic applies to government. Government is not some kind of weird floating exception to reality or apart from reality. Everything from there on out is just going to be specific examples of logic used on government. Is that what you really want though? Just a list of examples? From what I've seen, Rand didn't really use the heavily symbol laden "formal" logic much anyway, but to the extent the symbol-based version is still properly formed logic, what I said still applies.
 
You've made lots of threads here based on questions/objections to Objectivism. If you've said so before, sorry for the repeat, but aside from this forum, what are your sources of information on Objectivism? Also, do you yet consider any of your questions/objections to be sufficiently answered/resolved? I don't think I recall you saying before if you thought any of them were before you moved along to another thread and stopped posting in a previous one.

I'd like to point out briefly that any time we talk about anything in the actual, existing economy we have in real life, we're talking about what's going on in a mixed economy. The situation under an actual capitalist economy could be very, very different for any given specific example from the real world that we may discuss. Walmart, its owners, and the wages of its employees are all impacted by things like minimum wage laws, child labor laws, OSHA, the EPA, licensing laws, alcohol and tobacco laws, anti-monopoly laws, roads and other infrastructure being tax-funded, tax codes in general, laws favoring offering health insurance as a job benefit over purchasing it independently, etc cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ad nauseum. Our economy, including what job positions already exist, what new ones can be created and how easily, what happens and when if one becomes unemployed and so on are all extremely heavily skewed from what they would be in a capitalist system. The alternatives people face in the here and now vary greatly in many ways and specific cases from what they would be in a capitalist system.
Maybe Walmart would exist in a capitalist system, maybe it wouldn't. Maybe they'd exist and be a much smaller business. Maybe they'd be even bigger. They probably wouldn't be paying $9 an hour starting wages though since that's heavily influenced by minimum wage laws. Maybe they'd pay people less, maybe they'd pay more. There may be (if Walmart existed still) a lot more competition Walmart would be facing both in what other businesses they were competing with to sell products and in who they were competing with for getting people to work for them at all. If starting businesses wasn't so full of legal nightmares, more people may start them, including more people who could offer potential employees better compensation and people who may have otherwise worked for Walmart themselves. What jobs exist at Walmart could even be very different due to different products and services that may exist without all these legal hindrances. What hours people work at such a hypothetical version of Walmart may be very different too if it still was a relatively low paying option. It could be something people did fewer hours at and treated more as a supplement to incomes from other, higher paying jobs rather than being something so many people worked at as much as they could and heavily depended upon for large percentages of their income.
So, yeah, please don't assume that Walmart, or any other real business or job, is necessarily some perfect example of capitalism at work. People could have good intentions and goals and want and try to do things that would be in the spirit of capitalism and would be good to pursue under a capitalist system, and if so, that's great, praise worthy, very moral of them, but they're still going to have to work within and be impacted by the real world's heavily distorted mixed economy. Specific real world scenarios are always going to be needed to be taken with a whole shaker of salt when evaluating them against what would, could, and should be done under capitalism.
So, the actions of the owners of Walmart and of Walmart employees are not what they would be in a capitalist system. Anybody can try their best to pursue ends in a capitalistic manner though, they can still make morally correct choices out of far from morally ideal options. A and B may both be rotten options, and the only options, but B is definitely worse than A, so A is the moral choice to make. I don't know what the owner's end of things looks like to evaluate if they're making the most moral choices possible here as well as I could evaluate things on the employees' end, but you don't care about the owner's end in your first post anyway. Within the context of our flawed, flawed real economy, taking a relatively shitty job with relatively shitty pay is generally done because all other known options at the time are simply regarded as even worse. People don't take these jobs because they give a shit about the Waltons, they take them because they have some kind of unmet need of their own that this is the best thing they can find to try to fill it.
How much money the Waltons do or do not have is completely irrelevant, never even factoring into the decision to take the job or not. In our current, real economy, I doubt much would be achieved by trying to demand more pay just because the Waltons have a lot of money that, theoretically, they could give to employees. I doubt it since there are so many people out there just as desperate to get a paying job, maybe even more desperate. It's not that hard for people to simply be replaced in the here and now. If employees were to just get a bunch more money, just because they wanted it anyway, there's still so many employees and so much time to cover that I doubt you could go too long before the Waltons ran out of money and you had to go back to old wages again or the business got impacted in ways that may require cutting jobs or raising prices which could begin to make the business less successful or even fail too. You're not going to get more money, especially not for long, just because somebody you work for has more and you demand they give you what they have, especially not in the here and now. The current economy lacks incentive to pay people lots more for typical jobs at Walmart and paying them much more may not be feasible even if somebody tried. So, again, how much money the Waltons have is moot to deciding whether to work for their company of not. Somebody's life may still be notably improved over what it was before or what else they could have had by taking a job at $9 an hour even though it is still much less than what they may really want or need and much less than what they could have had in a real capitalist system. That's why people do it. They have their own self-benefiting motivations. They offer their time and services and find that $9 an hour is still worth it to them over the available alternatives.
(Side note, whoa, I haven't seen DavidOdden posting around here in aaaaaaaaages.)

I'd like to point out briefly that any time we talk about anything in the actual, existing economy we have in real life, we're talking about what's going on in a mixed economy. The situation under an actual capitalist economy could be very, very different for any given specific example from the real world that we may discuss. Walmart, its owners, and the wages of its employees are all impacted by things like minimum wage laws, child labor laws, OSHA, the EPA, licensing laws, alcohol and tobacco laws, anti-monopoly laws, roads and other infrastructure being tax-funded, tax codes in general, laws favoring offering health insurance as a job benefit over purchasing it independently, etc cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ad nauseum. Our economy, including what job positions already exist, what new ones can be created and how easily, what happens and when if one becomes unemployed and so on are all extremely heavily skewed from what they would be in a capitalist system. The alternatives people face in the here and now vary greatly in many ways and specific cases from what they would be in a capitalist system.
Maybe Walmart would exist in a capitalist system, maybe it wouldn't. Maybe they'd exist and be a much smaller business. Maybe they'd be even bigger. They probably wouldn't be paying $9 an hour starting wages though since that's heavily influenced by minimum wage laws. Maybe they'd pay people less, maybe they'd pay more. There may be (if Walmart existed still) a lot more competition Walmart would be facing both in what other businesses they were competing with to sell products and in who they were competing with for getting people to work for them at all. If starting businesses wasn't so full of legal nightmares, more people may start them, including more people who could offer potential employees better compensation and people who may have otherwise worked for Walmart themselves. What jobs exist at Walmart could even be very different due to different products and services that may exist without all these legal hindrances. What hours people work at such a hypothetical version of Walmart may be very different too if it still was a relatively low paying option. It could be something people did fewer hours at and treated more as a supplement to incomes from other, higher paying jobs rather than being something so many people worked at as much as they could and heavily depended upon for large percentages of their income.
So, yeah, please don't assume that Walmart, or any other real business or job, is necessarily some perfect example of capitalism at work. People could have good intentions and goals and want and try to do things that would be in the spirit of capitalism and would be good to pursue under a capitalist system, and if so, that's great, praise worthy, very moral of them, but they're still going to have to work within and be impacted by the real world's heavily distorted mixed economy. Specific real world scenarios are always going to be needed to be taken with a whole shaker of salt when evaluating them against what would, could, and should be done under capitalism.
So, the actions of the owners of Walmart and of Walmart employees are not what they would be in a capitalist system. Anybody can try their best to pursue ends in a capitalistic manner though, they can still make morally correct choices out of far from morally ideal options. A and B may both be rotten options, and the only options, but B is definitely worse than A, so A is the moral choice to make. I don't know what the owner's end of things looks like to evaluate if they're making the most moral choices possible here as well as I could evaluate things on the employees' end, but you don't care about the owner's end in your first post anyway. Within the context of our flawed, flawed real economy, taking a relatively shitty job with relatively shitty pay is generally done because all other known options at the time are simply regarded as even worse. People don't take these jobs because they give a shit about the Waltons, they take them because they have some kind of unmet need of their own that this is the best thing they can find to try to fill it.
How much money the Waltons do or do not have is completely irrelevant, never even factoring into the decision to take the job or not. In our current, real economy, I doubt much would be achieved by trying to demand more pay just because the Waltons have a lot of money that, theoretically, they could give to employees. I doubt it since there are so many people out there just as desperate to get a paying job, maybe even more desperate. It's not that hard for people to simply be replaced in the here and now. If employees were to just get a bunch more money, just because they wanted it anyway, there's still so many employees and so much time to cover that I doubt you could go too long before the Waltons ran out of money and you had to go back to old wages again or the business got impacted in ways that may require cutting jobs or raising prices which could begin to make the business less successful or even fail too. You're not going to get more money, especially not for long, just because somebody you work for has more and you demand they give you what they have, especially not in the here and now. The current economy lacks incentive to pay people lots more for typical jobs at Walmart and paying them much more may not be feasible even if somebody tried. So, again, how much money the Waltons have is moot to deciding whether to work for their company of not. Somebody's life may still be notably improved over what it was before or what else they could have had by taking a job at $9 an hour even though it is still much less than what they may really want or need and much less than what they could have had in a real capitalist system. That's why people do it. They have their own self-benefiting motivations. They offer their time and services and find that $9 an hour is still worth it to them over the available alternatives.
(Side note, whoa, I haven't seen DavidOdden posting around here in aaaaaaaaages.)

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.

The radio speech goes into more topics than just ethics. On the other hand you ought to read it in the context of the story. The Objectivist Ethics goes into more detail on ethics and how to arrive at ethics ("metaethics" is the technical term for the latter).
If you have time, read the entire novel - as you may already have done - and then move on to The Objectivist Ethics.

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.

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)

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.

"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.)
 

"- 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.
 
 

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.

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.

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.

I'm opposed to having people regularly stating moral evaluations of other participants in our forum threads. One's evaluation of somebody's character up to this point is not relevant or productive to the kinds of philosophic discussion that this forum is for. People can come to their own moral conclusions anyway just reading the facts and one need not fear people will think one supports things just because one hasn't made outright statements saying one condemns it in a particular discussion. It can serve several logical fallacy purposes also to make such statements in threads, things to try to sabotage arguments with, which I contend are bad to leave open unnecessarily. 1) Red herring. Bringing up your moral evaluation of somebody in such discussions is counter productive in that it may derail the discussion. We could go from discussing socialism (since that example was used earlier) to 10 other topics that were discussed elsewhere already all over again when people start arguing the validity of the moral conclusion about somebody that was stated and what else that conclusion was formed upon. We may take a long time then, if ever, on resuming the socialism discussion where we left off. 2) Ad hominem/poisoning the well. Even very corrupt people can be correct at times, so it's still not helpful to get arguments potentially dismissed based on the arguer even if that arguer is definitely not a great person. 3) Guilt by association/argument from intimidation. These moral evaluations may serve as threats against the self-esteem of somebody debating or somebody reading the debate, trying to get them to capitulate out of fear rather than actually being rationally convinced and possibly keeping others from seeing how the rest of the logical trains in the discussion would have played out. Additionally, saying bad things about people tends to be counterproductive to convincing them often anyway. It gets them to see you as an adversary looking to harm them, so they throw up their defenses and become less receptive to what you have to say. Either way, getting somebody to give in to your arguments from fear or resist your arguments from fear, it's bad. It's not helping spread rationality and thusly improving lives, that's for sure.
 
Have your moral evaluations, act on them, just pick some place/context to state them where they aren't going to gum up the works like this.

I'm opposed to having people regularly stating moral evaluations of other participants in our forum threads. One's evaluation of somebody's character up to this point is not relevant or productive to the kinds of philosophic discussion that this forum is for. People can come to their own moral conclusions anyway just reading the facts and one need not fear people will think one supports things just because one hasn't made outright statements saying one condemns it in a particular discussion. It can serve several logical fallacy purposes also to make such statements in threads, things to try to sabotage arguments with, which I contend are bad to leave open unnecessarily. 1) Red herring. Bringing up your moral evaluation of somebody in such discussions is counter productive in that it may derail the discussion. We could go from discussing socialism (since that example was used earlier) to 10 other topics that were discussed elsewhere already all over again when people start arguing the validity of the moral conclusion about somebody that was stated and what else that conclusion was formed upon. We may take a long time then, if ever, on resuming the socialism discussion where we left off. 2) Ad hominem/poisoning the well. Even very corrupt people can be correct at times, so it's still not helpful to get arguments potentially dismissed based on the arguer even if that arguer is definitely not a great person. 3) Guilt by association/argument from intimidation. These moral evaluations may serve as threats against the self-esteem of somebody debating or somebody reading the debate, trying to get them to capitulate out of fear rather than actually being rationally convinced and possibly keeping others from seeing how the rest of the logical trains in the discussion would have played out. Additionally, saying bad things about people tends to be counterproductive to convincing them often anyway. It gets them to see you as an adversary looking to harm them, so they throw up their defenses and become less receptive to what you have to say. Either way, getting somebody to give in to your arguments from fear or resist your arguments from fear, it's bad. It's not helping spread rationality and thusly improving lives, that's for sure.
 
Have your moral evaluations, act on them, just pick some place/context to state them where they aren't going to gum up the works like this.