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No, anything goes under whim-worship / anarchism. In a LFC society a government exists to protect rights. Only if property rights are violated. The right to property is not the privilege to damage or pollute the property of others. Then they should be able to sue for damages in a court of law. Things don't just happen "one way or another" for the hell of it. If you want to do XYZ to your crops in your property that shouldn't effect me at all. The second XYZ crosses over into my property, you have committed vandalism. The only solution to this is Capitalism. All property should be privately owned and if objectively provable damage occurs as a consequence of your neighbor's action, then you have a right to sue for those damages. This can only occur if property rights are protected by law.

If you read this article, you might find a lot of answers to the questions you asked: http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues...dual-rights.asp

But you can know. Objectivism holds that man's reason is fully competent to know the facts of reality. In fact, you just admitted you are generating ideas. If you know you are just generating ideas out of your imagination, why claim you don't know anything about them? Of course you know things about them. You just imagined them. I know you just imagined them. That's why I dismiss them, yet you imagine them, know you imagine them, then claim ignorance about them, even though you know you just invented it and have no proof for it.

So I take it you retract your former statements about supernatural beings interacting with reality in a way that humans can't see?

Prove ghosts do not exist. Prove unicorns do not exist. Prove fire-breathing dragons do not exist. "Prove that the fourth moon of Jupiter did not cause your sex life and that it was not a result of your previous incarnation as the Pharaoh of Egypt." Ayn Rand said that you cannot prove a negative statement for any statement that has no positive evidence. That is called arbitrary. If not being able to produce "negative evidence" (whatever that is) means something is automatically true, then by this reasoning, every god and imaginary creature ever invented by man's imagination must exist, since you can’t prove it false. This means Yahweh is not the only god, and Christianity is negated. The burden of proof is on you that make the claim.

Prove it.

Can you answer the question, yes or no?

So that's a yes, but you qualify it as saying we "can't see it." What's the difference between something that is invisible, non-corporeal, has no heat signature, displaces no atoms, is totally undetectable, and leaves absolutely no traces upon existence and something that doesn't exist at all? Magic?

Do they "interact with reality," yes or no?

It's been done before. People ended up in jail for it.

Maybe you can explain the difference between something which "does not interact with reality" and something that is not real then?

What's the difference between non-real and false?

Hi Edwin. Nice to see a fellow S'pore native on these boards. I was born there originally and lived there for six years, so I consider it my home-town even though my parents emigrated to the US. I can try to answer some of those, but (obiously) my views aren't representative of Objectivism any more than someone else who has only read Atlas Shrugged and a few other random pieces of Rand literature. 1. The key to eradicating malaria is Capitalism. There is a reason why in most Western nations malaria is extremely rare. DDT could be instrumental in destroying malaria, but it is banned by government for environmental concerns, (something about it effecting bird eggs. Birds > humans.) In the case of Bill Gates funding a vaccine, if he sees value in giving them out for free as an act of charity, there is nothing altruistic about that. Nor is it altruistic to accept one. Altruism carries with it a sacrifice which means force is involved. As long as Bill Gates isn't doing it because he is being forced to, or because he has a duty to self-sacrifice, then it is not immoral. It is an act of charity. If he chooses to make people pay for it, then people will be willing to pay for it if they find value in it, but no one has a right to steal from him at gunpoint. 2. By banning the initiation of physical force. There is no utopia in which all human beings' minds will be evolved. There will always be brutes who choose to reject individual rights and act violently. That is why men protect themselves through police and courts which have the sole purpose of protecting rights. Other than this, people who espouse immoral ideas can only be combatted through espousing moral ideas. Examples? It is (and should be) 100% legal to indoctrinate your children into believing whatever it is you want them to believe as long as you don't violate their rights. Your use of "brainwash" may imply some sort of coercion, I'm not sure how you are defining it, but as long as their rights are respected, they can only save themselves by choosing to think. 3. This is a complicated issue on the surface because government is here to protect you from men, not from nature. However, the pollution effecting people in S'pore constitutes smoke-aggression onto the private property of individuals, which means vandalism. They have a right to sue for damages against the responsible people in a court of law. Since the damages were ongoing, the S'pore and M'sia government are right to contact the Indonesian government and demand the smoke-aggression be ceased. How the Indonesians accomplish that is their responsibility, not the Singaporeans. Another way would be for firefighters to be hired to put out the flames, then send the bill to the Indonesian government.

Ayn Rand and other Objectivists have written several essays ("The Nature of Government" The Virtue of Selfishness, "Anarchism is Evil" OPAR Leonard Peikoff, "Anarchism versus Objectivism" Harry Biswanger, "Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty" Peter Schwarz) explicitly explaining why these ideas are contradictory to Objectivism (again, which is the philosophy of Ayn Rand.) So unless you can demonstrate that Ayn Rand isn't Ayn Rand, then you should come up with another word for your Molyneux's ideas about anarchism and war.

Sure you are. If I say "prove a negative" I am calling upon you to prove a negative. Anyone can "call upon you to prove" anything if they say it. I don't get it. Yes I know there is no difference between something that is invisible, noncorporeal, has no heat signature, takes up no space, and leaves no detectable traces upon existence, and something that is nothing at all. I'm talking about the "you can't prove a negative" argument used by Ayn Rand. Why say "you can't prove a negative" if you can prove a negative?

I'm not sure I fully understand the "prove a negative" argument. I can prove there is not a parasite on my head or in my head by showing to you that everything that is on my head is X minus a parasite. The same way I can prove there is not a fire-breathing dragon in my garage, by showing that everything that is in my garage is X minus a fire-breathing dragon. Or that I can prove that 4 is not greater than 5 by showing that 1+1+1+1=4+1=5. Surely you can prove a negative?

What makes a group of competing street gangs with the power to use force in a geographic area more "benefitial" than a government that is limited to only protecting me from physical force with a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force in a geographical area? Why should my rights be subject to the whims of competing gangs?

"I want, therefore, to make it emphatically clear that Objectivism is not an organized movement and is not to be regarded as such by anyone." -AR

If the leader of the free world would morally censure Iran for what it is doing, it could help influence opposition and any voters in many other countries to demand their rights. Even semi-free countries like Singapore, where I was born, a country with one-party rule and government prohibitions on free speech and free assembly, most people are massively pro-Obama and pro-West and a lot of news media hang on every word that Obama says. Does he realise how people could be influenced and energized by any headlines and statements from the US that reinforce the right to a government that protects rights instead of violating them?

Not to mention the incredibly vindictive nature of the statement: Bow down and worship God or burn in Hell for eternity. What kind of person with any shred of self-esteem would want cooperate with such an "all-loving" deity?

No, a government is not a self, and a nation is not an entity with rights. Only individuals have a self and only individuals have rights. But contrary to the Libertarian anti-war talking points, a government is an entity which has a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force and exists only for the purpose of protecting rights. This includes the rights of soldiers as individuals who should not be sacrificed for altruistic political goals.

A couple of problems I have: What rights are being destroyed if the torture has a self-defense value? You have already said that you would be okay with just taking them out back and shooting them, so by your own admission, they are outlaws that can claim no rights to their own life. Why then would you be destroying their "rights" by torturing them? This is not an argument against the ethics of self-defense. If it were my life, or the life of a loved one at stake, you can be absolutely certain that I would do a bit more than pouring water on someone's face. I would do it with complete moral conviction. Your society? Isn't this an incredibly collectivist statement? The whole "we are no different than the terrorists if we torture" argument is completely rediculous argument for pacifism. I am not the one initiating acts of barbarism against people because they have not accepted the teachings of some witch doctor. I don't want to torture, I want peace. I want to be left alone. If you want to violate my rights however, I have a moral imperative to defend myself. If I have to torture you to save my life, or a life of someone that has value to me, or the life of someone I am protecting, then I also have a moral imperative to torture you if that will prevent it. This is not "what makes us different from the terrorists" or "forgetting our sense of who we are" or "losing sight of our nation's principles," or whatever other pacifist slogan you can come up with. This is self-defense. What "makes us different" from fascist Muslims is that I did not initiate force, not what I do to defend myself from their violence. And by the way, the actual point where I totally lost interest and became completely disgusted with The Dark Knight was when Batman decided he would rather let the heroine get blown up and let other innocent people die adhering to some completely pointless "principles" than force The Joker into giving up the information or rather than just killing him when he had the chance. That is complete altruism and you should know it. This sounds like a Pragmatists' slogan to me and can be used by a mystic or a dictator to violate individual rights. There is no "using evil to fight evil" under Objectivist ethics. Either it is a rights violation and you may not take that action, or it is not a rights violation and you may take that action. There is no agnosticism when it comes to good and evil.

Can we have a "just say no" policy towards sycophantic cultists, who are under investigation for fraud, that open multiple accounts and pretend to be other people so they troll these forums to spread mongolism and falseness like "Christian Objectivism" and act like they "oppose" collectivism?

I'll be less vague because this interests me: It is a use of force. Force may be used only in self-defense and only against those who initiate its use. This applies to physical force, not some vaporous notion of "mental force." Given that, torture may not be used in certain situations (to gain a confession, against alleged criminals, against individuals who have not initiated force, against individuals who are not violating rights) because it has no self-defense value in these uses; but it may be used in certain other situations (against an individual who has initiated force in order to prevent a rights violation, against savages that hold someone's life in their hands, against rights violators that have information that will save a life) because it has a specific self-defense usage. What do Objectivists think about that? Peikoff suggested torture be used on Al-Qaeda members, for example, in order to give up information on bin Laden and other top terrorist leaders. [source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9sdQcwmdCs]

You don't support mysticism, but you do believe that an angel gave some guy in Utah some magical golden plates describing the visit of Jesus Christ to American Indians which, of course, he could not show to anyone, but was able to translate them from Egyptian into English by putting them into a hat containing magical stones. And then there's the magical underwear. And you want us to believe you are not in a cult?