Eiuol

I think you might be right. It's the kind of response you get when you ask chatgpt what it thinks the best movie is. When you do, it answers like a politician, trying to satisfy everyone.

Do you not see the irony? "If we force ourselves to stay within a stringent orthodoxy without adapting to new knowledge, we end up unable to make any scientific insights. Rather, since Objectivism is that which is true, everything grounded in reason and observable reality must be Objectivism." Objectivity is the master framework, not Objectivism. At least, so long as you accept that realism is true. Objectivism does not have a monopoly on philosophical realism. It just has a particular theory of objectivity that you think is true.

Unfortunately, by naming, some people use that as a way to name the only ideas that they will consider. And sometimes dogmatism even comes from naming that is so broad that Objectivism becomes synonymous with truth. "Rand was wrong, but since this other idea is true, the new idea is actually the correct Objectivist view." In any case, it's weird to me that some people have such a need to incorporate Objectivism specifically into their explicit life philosophy, without ever saying something like "Nothing in objectivism adequately deals with this issue, so here's my answer that is much better".

Taking positions about a war always amounts to supporting the killing of someone. The entire thread is practically a demonstration in discourse that is not rational in any sense. I don't participate in this thread precisely because no one seems actually interested in figuring anything out. But there is at least a semblance of discourse, even if it goes nowhere.

So stop trying to simplify it. Post something and expand on it, get into the complexities.

indeed, we definitely should completely ignore that Hamas and Palestine are different things, any support of Palestine is inherently support of Hamas. Palestine is obviously the same as Hamas. After all, it's easier to be a tribalist. If you don't support Israel, then you are part of the evil tribe. Very simple, reason not required.

You didn't, that's why I said don't try to. I mean, do you even have a better explanation for why someone who demonstrates advanced experience or has dived into deeper literature than the basics, would use bad arguments that they would have encountered before?

What it reminds you of is a good metaphor. You don't need to say "in this philosophy". You say it as if I'm regurgitating something I heard. I came up with that wording. We are mentally prepared for living life when we are in focus, when we are paying attention. But more than that, since you studied all this for many years, how can you seriously not know what it could mean? I'm giving you some pretty basic interpretations, not even controversial points. I think you're lying, because you're aware of some deep cuts and read them. You certainly already know the interpretations I'm offering you. Worse, your argument about virtue is quite simplistic, so simplistic I'm sure that you heard such arguments before. You already know why it's a bad argument. You already know that you are giving the caricature, not the actual position. You are dumbing yourself down. I'm sure you can do better. I read the book. I think he's right. But don't try to trick people here to think that by dialectical, he means Hegelian dialectic, hoping that they believe you because they didn't read the book.

Several pages later he gets into it. Your concentration is interrupted, but concentration is not a synonym for focus. The type of focus we are discussing is a mental preparedness, we aren't talking about concentration. A general state of self-control, by my meaning, is what focus enables, being ready to think about things in detail, taking control over your life and managing emotions as they come and go.

Rand speaks of thinking requiring full focus, but we can't think of full focus as the kind of focus that a ninja has. There are times of rest, and times of perceiving, neither of which is thinking per se. This does not require deliberate unfocusing. But as Peikoff is saying, focus is alertness, and being focused is a state of being committed to attaining full awareness of reality. This kind of focus is a lot like what Buddhism takes to be a state of mindfulness. You might argue that this isn't exactly what Rand said word for word, but when you assemble what others said about her ideas that she endorsed, what she agreed with, what she wrote about in her fiction, you can see that I'm saying to you is completely within her framework of philosophy. Don't be a zombie. Be prepared to think. Be in a general state of self-control. "The basic act of self-regulation possible to a human consciousness is to direct that consciousness, aimed in the direction of being aware, of being optimally conscious, of seeking to understand that with which it is dealing—or to suspend conscious focus, to go out of focus, to induce an inner fog." The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism. The way he says it, focus is being optimally conscious. And these are from the lectures that Rand explicitly endorsed.

Did you really study this for 10 years or more? You should already know that I would respond by saying that focus is meant to be in degrees, not as a constant state of being a ninja. You can modulate your level of focus, without completely eliminating any focus at all. Ellis isn't wrong for the most part, but he is wrong about what he thinks the Objectivist view is. Unfortunately, the subsequent debate with NB, NB gave a pretty bad defense, taking Ellis in bad faith. By the way, "you" is the general you.

If you're asking what Aristotle would say, he would say that you cannot look at a virtue in isolation, but in regard to an integration among them all. You could be "productive" in terms of an immediate product, but productivity must be analyzed in relation to all the other virtues. Each of your examples is an example of looking at virtues in isolation without regard to integrating them. The Golden mean is a way to find out what counts as virtue. Once you figure out what virtue is, then you ought to always be virtuous. So excessive pride by Aristotle's standards is not actually pride, but vanity. He doesn't say that the excess of any virtue is bad. There is a certain quality that is in excess, but is not the virtue in question. The quality is a kind of self regard, where vanity is the excess, humility the deficiency, and pride is the right amount of it. Vanity is pride in a superficial way, but it isn't actually pride. "In all the states of character we have mentioned, as in all other matters, there is a mark to which the man who has reason looks, and heightens or relaxes his activity accordingly, and there is a standard which determines the mean states that we say are intermediate between excess and deficiency, because they are in accord with correct reason." Book 6, Chapter 1, Nichomachean ethics As much as you say that you spent a lot of time studying this, you make some elementary errors of reasoning, even misinterpretation of philosophers you use to support your positions. You aren't making substantial critiques, your positions are more like what I've heard people say when they haven't spent much time actually working out what Rand is right or wrong about. Or what people say when they have only been introduced to her recently.

Who knows. But based on what this person wrote here, they were thinking dogmatically. It's not an assumption, it's using what they themselves said about their thinking.

I suspect that is more about rejecting dogmatic thinking, but rather than reevaluating Objectivist ideas that they once held dogmatically, the person just throws out all the old ideas at once without further consideration.

I mean, some of what you are saying is an issue of taking things dogmatically rather than agreeing with something because you thought hard about it. And sometimes it takes people a while before they realize that they were being dogmatic. The things you described feeling guilty about are flawed and harmful ways of thinking, that only come about from forcing oneself to believe something without having actually understood. The criticism about 'life qua man' is valid, in the way that I don't think Rand is explicitly clear what she means by this. I don't think her point is wrong, but what exactly means doesn't get nearly enough attention as it should. But it's definitely in her fiction. In a way, life-as-experienced is only portrayed in her fiction, where the process of being alive and the instrumental things to accomplish it creates a wondrous and enjoyable experience. Seeking life requires no further reason than that. In any case, it's hard to tell if you're here to have a discussion so that you can look at things in a different way, or if you are here to get angry and argumentative about everything because you blame Rand for leading you astray.