Axiomatic
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Posts posted by Axiomatic
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I agree with you for the most part here Ryan.
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I am no physicist, and fail to understand 100% of what is claimed on the website - however I am also pretty sure that it is fake. There is a lot of technobabble as pointed out and stuff that just doesnt really seem to make a whole lot of sense at all.
Also - if this thing had as much potential as claimed, there is the question of why this isnt huge news and why companies do not seem to be clamoring all over it. As usual it is probably because this is a hoax to defraud investors that are not that scientifically savvy or the "inventor" is deluded.
Yup, I have since come to the same conclusion after going through their website a bit more thoroughly.
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It is not possible to abstain from ruling on personal disagreements at this time because there is currently only one active chat moderator. If we had more moderators volunteer, it may become possible to off-load moderation responsibilities.
I would like to again nominate Dwayne for the position of another moderator position due to his consistent rationality, skill in dissolving disputes and his time-zone relation to knast.
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(I am making this public so non-moderators know what to expect.)
I want to outline some rules for chat moderators. (I expect this of forum moderators too.)
1.) Your position of authority comes with responsibilities. When you are acting in your capacity as moderator, you must take those responsibilities seriously.
Thats obvious and resonable
2.) You may joke, express emotions, curse and even insult (to a degree) when you are not acting as a moderator. In your capacity as moderator, you may not do any of these things.
Does that mean that the moderator must 'switch modes' between being informal and acting in the professional capacity , or do you mean that he just must act formal all of the time?
3.) You must provide reasons for your actions, citing specific examples for all moderation activity.
This is certainly reasonable
4.) I would like to be able to prohibit moderators from acting against users they have a personal disagreement with, but that is not practical for chat. Chronic (persistent) cases however, should be taken to the moderator forum or given to another moderator.
Thats pretty ambiguous. So a moderator can use his position against people arbitrarily for his own personal disagreements or not? Would it not be more prudent to lay down precisely what general instances a moderator may exercise their powers. For example, if someone persistently attacks O'ism or prominent O'ists or indeed other users with ad homenin attacks that add no value to rational discussion, can that be an instance where a moderator can use his powers or not?
To concretize the correct attitude, just imagine that you are a judge in a court room. That's the kind of professionalism you should exert as a moderator.
I hope this post is sufficient explanation.
Thats also pretty vague, but I get your general point. I hope you mean in this instance that in by 'as moderator' you mean when exercising powers of moderation and that one does not need to be uptight and 'professional' in every instance of discussion in chat. That would make the position of moderator of chat very undesirable indeed.
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Even if I correctly integrate the information I have and come to a specific conclusion, it won't be "proof" unless other people agree with me. What am I missing?
Consensus is not proof of anything. If everyone you knew agreed that the world was flat in the face of evidence to the contrary, would you consider that the truth?
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Though while it is slightly offtopic, I would like to suggest that a second chat mod would be potentally handy for when Carl isnt around ( which I think is quite a bit of the time when the chat is fairly busy ).
Yup, I second this motion! Dwayne for mod please!
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I haven't concerned myself much with moderation of this forum. I have heard complaints about how it has been moderated now and again but I have not been on the wrong end of it if there has been any poor moderation, nor have I heard specifics of any of these supposed cases so I cannot say anything about that.
However I really would have to agree with Amaroq that we badly need a moderator in the chatroom, the majority of the people that frequent there seem to agree at this point on this matter. In fact the majority of the people that don't agree are the people that I am certain would be the ones moderated.... The ignore function simply does not do the job based on the specific problems we have been having. We have actually had about 7 people this last month and a half, new people, that didn't post on the forums (but I think read them) but really enjoyed the chat feature, because it gives them a way to truly interact with other Oists in real time, which is great for people that don't have any around their area....well...they were run off. I have not seen a single one of them again, because they just could not deal with the constant trolling etc. The chat room is a great place when these people (delinquents rather) can handle themselves or are not around, but the rest of the time it is frustrating. People do not put the users on ignore when they should and so I end up having to ignore most of the chatroom when these outbreaks happen, in which case I might as well not even be there. We simply cannot afford to be losing people that may be interested in Objectivism and find the chatroom to be an essential component of that process to be run off by these idiots that cannot handle themselves like adults. I mean hell, my own girlfriend only went in there a few times because she got frustrated with it, even though she really liked some of the people there and felt she was learning some valuable things.
So I am begging you to consider placing two people as moderators in the chatroom, so that we can have the entire time cycle covered fairly well. I personally would suggest Knast and Dwayne for that.
They are both level headed people that are more than fit for that job and they, together, cover the majority of the 24 hours with their presence. I am not saying we need to start banning people, we can have certain rules for them for what they can do to users who need to be moderated, and we can put specific chat room rules up in a post on the forums or something, but I think this needs to be done. It can be just kicking users, or 1 day or few hour suspensions max or whatever works out. This is the only active Oist chatroom I am aware of, there are several well trafficked forums around the internet but I enjoy this one the most regarding both the content and the people, and I think the chatroom is a bit undervalued by people here regarding its utility and its importance to the overall online Oist community. I honestly think that chatroom would get substantially more traffic after a while, and in turn, these forums, if it was properly moderated in some fashion.
I could not agree more!
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I honestly don't pay much attention to the boards anymore. But I'd like to use this as an opportunity to nominate Knast as moderator of the chat. If you're willing to consider a chat moderator, that is. I think it could really use one and I can think of no better candidate.
Seconded!
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Sagan was definitely not an Objectivist, but he does have good things to say sometimes, and damn, the man makes me care about astronomy, that's a pretty mean feat in and of itself.
^^^^This
The mans love of Astronomy got me interested in it. Its such an important science too!
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I'd define evil as a hostile disposition towards the values needed to sustain man's life and a voluntary rejection of reality for the sake of wish-fulfillment.
The altruist is at least passively evil since he rejects his own valuing faculty for the demands and whims of others, which leads to a profound loss of self-esteem and moral conviction. He may not be actively on the hunt for victims, but he experiences no outrage when confronted with deliberate evil; his default response is to rationalize, appease and accomodate. Worse, he'll be driven to discourage and demonize the efforts of those combating evil (or even promoting any sort of life-affirming value) since he believes such efforts are judgmental and needlessly antagonistic; privately, he has internalized the moral-practical dichotomy and associates evil with power.
That is an excellent definition.
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The section talking about book censorship reminded me of a Ray Bradbury quote: You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Which brings up another thing I thought about. Though Huxley and Orwell have both accurately predicted the way our world has evolved, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has been the most accurate representation of the way pop culture and visual media have evolved.
I completely agree Fahrenheit was much more poignant than 1984 or BNW. While 1984 and BNW both focused on the malevolent aspect and methods of state control, Fahrenheit 451 was set in such a future but focused more on the cultural vacuum left over from citizens outright rejection of the intellect, with malevolent state control portrayed accurately as the end result fitting of such a vacuum.
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Wow, this guy worked in 'military intelligence'. I thought this was a joke at first but no this is for real. He has a degree in political science!? This has got to be a plant or a mistake of some description, otherwise this might indeed be a snapshot view of the kind of candidates America can expect in the future. Reminds me of that movie 'Idiocracy'.
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I stumbled across this website not so long ago and have recently read an article about the work. Was wondering if any scientists on this board would care to comment on this apparently new way to produce energy from hydrogen. I'm pretty sure it has met with a lot of derision so far, but I don't know enough about this to comment.
http://www.blacklightpower.com/
Article I read:
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The left would spin it. Tomorrow's headlines would read: 'Rand Paul vows to Fight to the Death for Segregation".
Yeah, very true and sad.
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Yes, a more Voltaire style response would have been better. Something along the lines of.
"While I do not condone what some people do with their property I will defend to the death their right to own it"
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It is a free country. That doesn't mean people have to stay silent about it. Not only can we pass moral judgment, but we should pass moral judgment on people and organizations for their actions.
Agreed.
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Put a gun in my mouth and paint the walls with my brains.
Here we ho again.
There is no slower boat to Hell. It's a decision between a boat that has a nice yellow and red paint job and one that is adorned in crosses, playing gospel music.
OK. All boats to hell are equal. -
Socialism is starting to look good right about now.
I'd take neo-conservatism over total socialism any day.
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Toohey: What do you think of Libertarianism Mr Roark?
Howard: I don't.
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As I said, it is not unforgivable evil. It is moral mediocrity.You should never strive for the middle road -- that which is not virtuous, but not unforgivable evil.
After reading through and thinking about your previous reply this is where I'm at now also. Its not a moral act due to the fact that it was not earned by ones own merits for oneself, and it is not an immoral act due to one not advocating the sacrifice.
This is quite an interesting dilemma as previously I thought of ethics and being black and white with no really 'neutral' grounds.
So my next question is, is there a moral grey area with regard to receiving sacrificial offerings? Or is it just simply not within the sphere of ethics at all?
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I'm a very professional person and they look ...cheap after a while.
I just don't see the point, they are cheap, they are tacky and they are juvenile.
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I don't despise any of my relatives. If I did, I wouldn't take their money. But that really is besides the point, your original story is perfectly concrete and very different from this new dead relative one.
My original story pertains to self-sacrifice of a self-destructive person. If this were further concertized to a relative dying of a self-inflicted condition then it does not change the context much but gives on pause for thought. I did not ask whether or not you despised your relatives, nor do I care. I am asking you to consider the situation.
I agree that there are issues to work through on this point hence why I made this thread, but you are not getting to the crux of the situation at all, so please either add something with proper reasoning to the thread or go away.
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That would indicate that the act is not profoundly evil; I'm suggesting that you've set the bar too low, and that you're focusing on the relationship between your act and the life of the other, in your computation of morality. It is common for people to address moral questions by deciding "First, is there initiation of force; second, am I encouraging others to be morally bad?" -- I'm suggesting that the first question really ought to be "In what way does this benefit my life?". An egoistic ethics starts with "I", and an altruistic ethics starts with "others" (that is, after all, the root word behind "altruism").You are presuming that you benefit simply by acquiring stuff. I don't see that. In what way is free stuff an intrinsic "benefit" to me?
This is all a bit too hypothetical; some element of generality is necessary because we're talking about moral principles, not just a single concrete situation. The way you set it up, accepting the object is not a recognition of a valued friendship -- you detest the person. If you detest the person, that alone should provide your answer. OTOH if this is actually a friend, then I might accept the gift as a recognition of that relationship. If I were suffering unfortunate circumstances and needed $10,000, I might accept a gift from a benevolent stranger (assuming I failed to secure a loan, and could not get the guy to lend me the money).
So back to my question: how is this a benefit to you? Are you claiming that it is always a benefit to get stuff, and that how you get it isn't a significant issue (i.e. whether or not it was earned)?
You bring up some excellent points and some good questions. I'll have to think some more before I respond. Thank you.
The Logical Leap by David Harriman
in Objectivist Lectures/Books
Posted
Great post. This is a good question I would like answered also.