Gramlich

A possible world makes sense if and only if it refers to a future state of the one real world. Other ways I've seen it used are gibberish.

Leibniz claimed that this is the best of all possible worlds.
I wonder whether it is the only logically possible world or whether it is possible to have a different universe in the first place. Both Leibniz' claim and my subsequent inquiry most likely can't be proven, but it's an interesting thought experiment, even without the invocation of God. It makes one wonder what sort of leeway something like a law of a universe could have and what does it mean for something to be possible.

My reasoning for why the universe would be the only logically possible world is based primarily on the fact that the universe is logical. This should leave it to be something of an immense logical system with potentially innumerable number of interlocking and non-contradicting components and systems (Although, an infinite universe may put to question whether the universe could be described as a "system," since it would never be "closed," which may significantly effect this line of thought/argument). As such, I would presume that this logical interlocking where laws and entities must act non-contradictory, harmoniously, and simultaneously would necessarily disqualify certain "potential" laws and false ways of existence, leaving this universe and its orientation as the only ones that could ever exist.

Of related interest:
In May of 1964, Rand wrote a letter to Prof. John O. Nelson at the University of Colorado. The letter includes the following paragraph:
“I must mention that Galt’s Gulch is not an organized society, but a private club whose members share the same philosophy. It exemplifies the basic moral principles of social relationships among rational men, the principles on which a proper political system should be built. It does not deal with questions of political organization, with the details of a legal framework needed to establish and maintain a free society open to all, including dissenters. It does not deal with specifically political principles, only with their moral base. (I indicate that the proper political framework is to be found in the Constitution, with its contradictions removed.)”
Letters of Ayn Rand,  Michael Berliner, editor (1995, 626)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Also relevant:
"Small and large organizations support themselves in entirely different ways. The theory [Olson's] indicates that, though small groups can act to further their interest much more easily than large ones, they will tend to devote too few resources to the satisfaction of their common interests, and that there is a surprising tendency for the 'lesser' members of the small group to exploit the 'greater' members by making them bear a disproportionate share of the burden of any group action."
From the publisher, concerning Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action.

Your moral indignation is understandable from a rational and moral perspective.
Your dilemma is that you have discovered morality and yet you live in a culture where evil and immorality abounds.
The egalitarians who see equality as such as the basis of morality do not care what happens to you or anyone as long as equality of result and the machine or system in place working toward that end is not disturbed.  They will trade your LIFE rather than face the possible "expense" of "weakening the FDA’s critical role" in making sure that all Americans "can have confidence" in the safety and effectiveness of our medical products.  They are willing to trade your life for ensuring the "strength" of some system and for the implied need for the "people" to have confidence in that system.  Is this a direct call for your sacrifice?  Absolutely.  Should you be enraged at those espousing this view?  Absolutely.
Should you try to live in a culture or society such as this?  If it is in your self-interest overall, of course.  The key is not to spend more of your time than is necessary to contemplate the evil if everything considered you are going to remain.  You've noted the evil, it is not in your self-interest but it is not an imminent threat to your immediate health or safety.  File it away, understand it, perhaps think about how one day you could deal with it if necessary, and put it out of your mind.
Your life is yours and no one else's to morally regulate.  If this means someday you need to leave the US to get the treatment, perhaps fly the US doctor to a country where you and the doctor could work on saving your life.. then certainly you need to look at how you could fund and arrange for that to happen, if and when that day comes. 
 
Understandably, you are mad others think they own your life... just remember to mentally tell them to F-off, but then you have to put it behind you and live, taking all the necessary actions to pursue your life.
 

You could read The Art of Non-Fiction, written by Rand, herself.

What do you mean "regardless of his politics"? Your whole post is about civil rights, which in the US was aimed at removing racism from government. That's a political cause. The only thing that should matter to you is his politics.
 
I don't understand why you would celebrate the election of Barack Obama, if that is your cause. The Obama administration is the first racist leadership the US had in decades, and his cronies have spent the past five and a half years working tirelessly to institute racial discrimination back into the American system of government. 
 
His election was a huge step back for civil rights.

You're trying to evaluate him by comparing him to someone who follows a set of absolute rules. You're saying that he failed to follow the rule "don't get on trains without a ticket", but did follow the rule "look for a job". 
 
But morality is about choices, not commandments. The moral ideal is not someone who follows all the rules, but someone who makes the right choices whenever he is faced with alternatives. The so called "rules" are just context dependent consequences of more fundamental philosophical principles. 
 
The question is, did he make the right or wrong choice, by getting on the train? I think it's a pretty easy question (yes). While it makes perfect sense to always abide by the rule "don't get on a train without a ticket" in normal, everyday life in a free society (because it is the selfish thing to do), it makes no sense to try and import that rule into his context. Instead, one must make the moral evaluation of his choice, given his options, based on more fundamental principles. 

I love your icon.

Until Rob Parker, ESPN's resident bigot, accused Robert Griffin III, Washington's sensational rookie quarterback, of being a "cornball brother" (i.e., someone who "acts white"), I had not even heard of the man. I'm no fan of the practice of holding athletes out as examples to children of how to lead life, but RGIII, as he is known, sounds like a decent person by all accounts. As USA Today's Deborah Barrington put it, "Griffin III is exactly who my ancestors would want a young black man to be: successful, talented, respectful and rich. Who wouldn't want to hang out with him?"

I have been happy to see that lots of commentators, like Barrington, have spoken up to condemn Parker's bigotry. I was about to say "defend Griffin", but it is clear that he is independent enough that he probably doesn't need it. (Still, I see that he has been man enough to acknowledge and thank his supporters.) What is also clear is that the real target of remarks such as Parker's and the kind of "thinking" they exemplify isn't a man who can clearly take care of himself, but black children all across our country who can't yet do the same. It is the real purpose of cowardly remarks like this, of which Parker's are only the most recent example, to make sure they never can.

If you don't believe me, read the long litany of black-on-black psychological abuse described by Lee Habeeb of National Review. Such is the corrupt, life-hating state of the main part of the black intelligentsia that anyone who dares to be different (like RGIII) or who raises concerns about it (like Bill Cosby, as Habeeb notes at some length) becomes a target. Oh, and of course, anyone who self-identifies as black (or is generally regarded as black) can come under fire for merely having some white ancestry, as Shaun Powell points out. (It speaks ill of the President that he goes along with this, as exemplified by the example Powell gives of him pandering to a roomful of reporters by deliberately showing up late.)

I am happy to see from Barrington's piece that Griffin did not dignify Parker with a direct answer: Parker doesn't deserve one. Nevertheless, the kind of thinking that led to those remarks bears closer examination. Ayn Rand, whose "prophecies" aren't limited to our current slide into an economic depression, nailed Parker's mentality to the wall decades ago:


Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge--for an automatic evaluation of men's characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment--and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem). Parker has nothing of value behind his black skin, so he has to ascribe all kinds of magical qualities to it. Parker sees someone who rejects his magical thinking and so he feels threatened, but he never really bothers to ask why. Parker resents Robert Griffin because Robert Griffin is a man, and Parker is afraid that his example might lead to too many kids growing up to become men. Parker sees himself for what he is for a moment and faces a choice: change himself or destroy someone else. We see what Parker tried to do, and it is little different than what any cowardly white supremacist might have wanted. Showing himself to be the kind of animal that sees safety in numbers, Parker tried to get RGIII kicked out of the pack. Further showing himself to be not even sub-human, Parker also tried to snuff out the spirit of any young black man who might see that quarterback as a hero.

The real Uncle Tom here is Rob Parker -- and that term, even as it is commonly used, is really too good for him. Parker is trying to do what no Klansman could ever hope to do, which is to get black people to marginalize themselves. I hope the folks at ESPN have the sense, decency, and courage to fire him.

-- CAV

Link to Original

This might cheer you up:


We're getting better! Like, empirically speaking.

"At some point in a romantic relationship, you can be certain that a woman will:
Raise a bizarre accusation, with the purpose of seeing if she can get you to defend yourself against it.

Attempt to incite an argument, to find out whether you can be suckered into fighting with her.

Try to change plans initiated and created by you, often at the last minute, effectively assuming control and placing herself into the dominant position in the relationship.

A woman's task in these moments is to try to make things complicated — to confound and agitate you, with the goal being to provoke you into reacting to her out of fear."

Where on earth are you getting this from? What females have you met? This does not apply to all women in spite of your claim that it does. It sounds like you've created some kind of weird conspiracy theory or something here, believing it is in the nature and intent of women in general to try to create conflict and inconvience in their romantic relationships. Not so. If you've really got somebody who is trying to provoke you in a relationship, that's not inevitable or even normal and probably not healthy either. Headgames are not just some part of one sex. Personally, I'd recomend ditching anybody of any sex who is trying to manipulate and torment you.

Man, I just don't know what to do knowing the space aliens are ignoring us. I thought we really had something going on.

Man, I just don't know what to do knowing the space aliens are ignoring us. I thought we really had something going on.

Don't worry, Wotan; I have it all covered.
I conversed with a rock today that told me Steve Job's soul was currently travelling past the Gligok galaxy, on its way to Valhalla. Now, as is well known, the Gligok galaxy is home to the infamous Kecktox. An evil race known for its proclivity of enslaving souls as they make their cosmic voyage.
Me and the rock both agreed something had to be done, so, being a wizard, I cast a spell on Steve Job's soul to hide it from the Kecktox's souldar.
With any luck, Steve Job's soul should arrive safely at Valhalla, where he will be at peace slaying Jewish money lenders for all of eternity.

Don't worry, Wotan; I have it all covered.
I conversed with a rock today that told me Steve Job's soul was currently travelling past the Gligok galaxy, on its way to Valhalla. Now, as is well known, the Gligok galaxy is home to the infamous Kecktox. An evil race known for its proclivity of enslaving souls as they make their cosmic voyage.
Me and the rock both agreed something had to be done, so, being a wizard, I cast a spell on Steve Job's soul to hide it from the Kecktox's souldar.
With any luck, Steve Job's soul should arrive safely at Valhalla, where he will be at peace slaying Jewish money lenders for all of eternity.

Don't worry, Wotan; I have it all covered.
I conversed with a rock today that told me Steve Job's soul was currently travelling past the Gligok galaxy, on its way to Valhalla. Now, as is well known, the Gligok galaxy is home to the infamous Kecktox. An evil race known for its proclivity of enslaving souls as they make their cosmic voyage.
Me and the rock both agreed something had to be done, so, being a wizard, I cast a spell on Steve Job's soul to hide it from the Kecktox's souldar.
With any luck, Steve Job's soul should arrive safely at Valhalla, where he will be at peace slaying Jewish money lenders for all of eternity.

Don't worry, Wotan; I have it all covered.
I conversed with a rock today that told me Steve Job's soul was currently travelling past the Gligok galaxy, on its way to Valhalla. Now, as is well known, the Gligok galaxy is home to the infamous Kecktox. An evil race known for its proclivity of enslaving souls as they make their cosmic voyage.
Me and the rock both agreed something had to be done, so, being a wizard, I cast a spell on Steve Job's soul to hide it from the Kecktox's souldar.
With any luck, Steve Job's soul should arrive safely at Valhalla, where he will be at peace slaying Jewish money lenders for all of eternity.

Don't worry, Wotan; I have it all covered.
I conversed with a rock today that told me Steve Job's soul was currently travelling past the Gligok galaxy, on its way to Valhalla. Now, as is well known, the Gligok galaxy is home to the infamous Kecktox. An evil race known for its proclivity of enslaving souls as they make their cosmic voyage.
Me and the rock both agreed something had to be done, so, being a wizard, I cast a spell on Steve Job's soul to hide it from the Kecktox's souldar.
With any luck, Steve Job's soul should arrive safely at Valhalla, where he will be at peace slaying Jewish money lenders for all of eternity.

Rand herself admits that she could not have conceived of her view of humanity and of how it should be organized politically without the aid of the examples set in the early industrial revolution, where trade was (mostly) voluntary. Is she admitting then that before this time, she would have an irrational view of political philosophy? No, merely that the evidence for what we now know as the best socio-economic system was not available to those in the 17th century.

Of course now, believing in the power of the state as or any forced together collective as the arbiter of political rule is as irrational as belief in God. Belief in god many moons ago might not have been unjustified. However, in the past 200 years our knowledge of nature has grown in leaps and bounds. An admittance into one's knowledge of God or of the valid power of the state in social organization shows a rather willful or malignant ignorance of the facts. Perhaps an individual in North Korea or the African jungle may not know the benefits of capitalism, but when one lives in a relatively free society, where the fruits of capitalism have come to bear, one can draw no reasonable conclusion about those who support socialist or any sort of totalitarian policy other than that person is malignantly ignorant at least in this aspect of his philosophy and likely in other aspects.

I disagree whole-heartedly: this gets us into the realm of universals, which might be one of Rand's weakest points.

I can certainly conceive of the color "red", without its being attached to any entity. Granted, this will have been the result of the cumulative perceiving of what "red" means, that is, as an accident attached to a subject. What is particularly interesting is how the mind will "group" these accidents together, so that a warm red, and a cool red, will still be seen as belonging to the family of "red".

Ultimately you can't refute an act of faith such as that. You can argue with rationalizations and his megalomaniac assumption of omniscience for physics.

First, quarks and other particles act as if they have spatial extents, they are not point-like and so there is no possibility of learning their locations with perfect accuracy because they don't have them.

Second, the laws of physics do not exist so they cannot be causal agents.

Existence exists and statements about existence are acts of consciousness which derive their truth value from existence. This is the primacy of existence principle. If we experiment with dropping a ball bearing from a variety of heights and timing the duration of the fall, we will generate a number of facts that are correlations: 6 feet, 0.61 seconds; 12 feet, .086 seconds; 18 feet, 1.06 seconds. These facts can be integrated into an abstraction relating height and time into a formula: h=kt2. The truth of the abstraction still derives from the facts upon which it is based, and the facts are based on perceptions of reality. All of the laws of physics are derivative from facts in exactly this same way, the greatest abstractions simply rely upon a greater quantity and variety of facts.

Facts have an existential quality to them but principles derived from facts are wholly epistemic artifacts. The role of the "laws of physics" is not to instruct or govern or cause matter to behave in certain ways, but to instruct man what it is permissible to think. The laws of physics do not govern the universe they govern people the same as any other law.

The illusion of omniscience created by hindsight in conjunction with principles of physics causes the psychological plausibility of determinism. No matter what happened in the past there will always be a physical explanation of how it happened in terms of physical necessity. But the truth of the explanation derives from the facts, it is not the explanation that caused the facts. Logical priority and semantic meaning moves in the direction of from existence to consciousness. A physical explanation incorporates choices as facts; it is not a physical explanation that makes choices into facts. To think explanations or predictions can cause facts is explicitly an appeal to primacy of consciousness and is an error.

Norman Swartz (Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University (not an Objectivist)) has explained this issue clearly at Lecture Notes on Free Will and Determinism by way of the similarity between the errors made in physical determinism and logical determinism. Aristotle refuted logical determinism and the same argument is adapted to refute physical determinism. In chapter 10 of his book The Concept of Physical Law (the link is to the 25 pages of chapter 10 only) Prof. Swartz states "logical truths and contingent truths both take their truth from the way the world is" (pg. 138 or 23 of 25) which comes very close to identifying the same error Dr. Peikoff identifies in The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy in ITOE. I derive this explanation from Prof. Swartz' argument and recast it slightly to relate it to Objectivism.

I fear that the normalcy bias will be the undoing of America.

Yes I watched the entire thing. If the people doing it have no right (have not been granted permission to demonstrate - it does not matter what sort of demonstration) to do it in the first place then the possibility or not of someone getting hurt is absolutely and entirely irrelevant. As it was, the idea was for there to be a flash mob. You know what that entails, a bunch of people performing a dance or what have you. With a number of people dancing like that there certainly is a possibility of someone being hurt and therefore there is a responsibility on the part of the security guards to prevent it.



Wrong. The security officer approached the people and told them that if they demonstrated without a permit they would be arrested. There is warning # 1, and any violation from that point onward is a direct violation of the orders they were given by those responsible to ensure the safety and security of EVERYONE visiting that memorial that day. The police were obviously informed that something was going to go on, probably because the person who had the idea to do this announced it on the internet or on his radio program or something.

At the 1 minute mark the two people who were later arrested for slow dancing walk into the frame from the direction where the police officer was explaining the repercussions -the girl was close enough to touch the person standing on the right side of the frame as she walked out. They look directly at the police officer and the camera smiling and begin to dance that is called provocation, and again is in direct opposition to the orders they were just given by those responsible for the safety and security of everyone in the memorial.



No, not doing anything would be an abdication of their responsibility to ensure the peaceful use of a national monument to EVERYONE and not let a bunch of people disrupt others use and enjoyment of that public facility.



At 2:35 one person was complying when his friend comes in and starts pulling him away the officer is then forced to take the original man down to the ground to control the situation and he then begins telling the other man to "Sir, back of, back off"

At 2:48 the man with the brown shirt who had been pulling on the other one is on the ground and the police officer is trying to handcuff him. You can see him resisting putting his hands behind his back in spite of being ordered to do so. The police then escalate as they are trained and have every right to do in the completion of their duties.

At 3:03 the guy in the white shirt walking away from and pulling away from the officer is resisting.



Actually in my opinion the police were doing exactly what they have been trained to do. I'm not a cop but I have had to deal with similar situations and the police handled themselves well in the most part.


As much as you may believe that being arrested for dancing is stupid you should realize that they were not arrested for dancing but for demonstrating without permission. The rest is emotional sensationalism.



I bet that if they had planned to do this flash mob in the middle of a field on the national mall then they would not have been stopped but they planned to do it in an enclosed space in a public memorial without permission.

It doesn't matter how stupid you think it is there is a correct way and an incorrect way of changing the law.

If I decided that drug laws were stupid (which they are) and I planned to get 100 of my best dope-fiend friends to do lines of coke on the white house lawn would you still claim that we were arrested for no reason and that it was just stupid?

Who had the cojones to downvote my post? How can you even argue with what I said? You would have to be willfully ignorant to events in the last year, no less in the last few decades.

Take any group of people of equal numbers. Put them in those situations and you will get a few that behave exactly like this if not worse. It reminds me of the line from "Apocalypse Now" Kurtz: "We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"

By the way would this be the proper time to bring up the Objectivist ideal of total war? Where the deaths of civilians are the responsibility of the people they support even if only tacitly, and that any free nation has the right to invade any slave pen?

War is hell, policing up the bodies and body parts is the kind of shit that makes grown men cry, puke and shit their pants so if you don't like the look of it then don't ever claim that you can send a man to war and have it be all pretty and sterile like some sort of 1930's movie where men fall gracefully and intact when they are shot and you don't have to see their skulls come apart.

It's time that the civilian population grew up, more than just a little.

Get in, get it done and get out with the fewest numbers of our own killed, or maimed. THAT is the job. Not making it all pretty for the fucking camera.