Eiuol
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Posts posted by Eiuol
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16 minutes ago, John_Galt_DOA said:
You're making it clear that Objectivism to you is a closed system. This view in general has led to a stringent orthodoxy in which Objectivism's fundamentals cannot be revised based on new scientific insights, but rather sets the philosophical boundaries science must stay within. If scientific theories or models from other disciplines contradict Objectivist principles, it is those other knowledge domains that require correction. Objectivism, grounded in reason and observable reality, provides the philosophical master-framework that other specialized sciences must fit into.
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.
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5 hours ago, necrovore said:
I see it mostly as a question of naming, not dogma -- and perhaps a question of fairness to Ayn Rand, in the sense of identifying whose thoughts are whose.
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".
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1 hour ago, AlexL said:
Additionally, I will ask them to take a stance towards your "Free Palestine!" statement, which I consider a call for murder.
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.
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22 minutes ago, EC said:
it is both much more complex and much simpler in other ways.
So stop trying to simplify it. Post something and expand on it, get into the complexities.
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5 hours ago, EC said:
This answers all of the nonsense stated here accurately. And no, I won't be responding to those who promote it and evil.
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.
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1 hour ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
He's right. but I didn't say Hegelian dialectic. With a bias against me as a liar, there's no point in taking this any farther.
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?
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4 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
P.s. I still don't know what "mental preparedness" means in the context of this philosophy. As I said above, it reminds me of the attitude of soldiers preparing to go into battle. But most people aren't soldiers. So what are we mentally preparing for?
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.
2 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:But in reality, Chris Sciabarra wrote a book called Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (which has my name in the foreword, btw) proving (or not) that Ayn Rand's politics contains dialectical statements.
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.
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15 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
In that quote I see an either-or distinction being made between optimal consciousness and suspension of consciousness, but nothing about degrees of focus.
Several pages later he gets into it.
9 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:For example, I might be reading something on this forum that reminds me of something else. So my focus is interrupted by an internal train of thought and memory.
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.
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40 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
Leonard Peikoff in OPAR goes into more detail about this:
This is the kind of thing I'm referring to. "Full awareness of reality." I don't see degrees of focusing in that statement, but full focus. I agree that there are degrees of focus. But if someone else in charge at the ARI said that there were degrees of focus, I don't know about it. Perhaps NB stated something like that in one of his post-NBI books? Using full focus at all times is asking for someone to employ a superhuman degree of intellect.
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.
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1 hour ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
Looks like a semantic different here. I'm not sure, however, why you had to use the words "you" and "your" seven times in the last paragraph. No need to get personal. I suppose it has something to do with Objectivism.
Too much reason, rationality, or as Rand liked to call it, "focusing" -- well, it's impossible to be focused all the time as she advised people to do. Psychological studies show that office workers take several small open-eyed naps during the afternoon. "When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions." “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 20. So the only way to be human, and to avoid the accusation of being subhuman, is to be focused all the time. This is not rational.
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.
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On 4/19/2024 at 11:29 PM, Ogg_Vorbis said:
Aristotlean ethics is sorely needed here.
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.
On 4/20/2024 at 8:56 AM, Ogg_Vorbis said:"Nothing but" productivity? Workaholism.
Each of your examples is an example of looking at virtues in isolation without regard to integrating them.
On 4/19/2024 at 11:29 PM, Ogg_Vorbis said:Should one always be rational, productive, and proud? Run that question through the lens of the Golden Mean and see what comes out.
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.
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2 hours ago, EC said:
What if it is only *assumed* that they held Objectivist facts of reality as dogma (which is what happens in the vast majority of cases) instead of following each argument Miss Rand carefully in all the non-fiction, applying reason to integrate the knowledge that agrees with one's sense of life that they always possessed?
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.
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6 hours ago, necrovore said:
There is a flip side to this, namely, that some subjectivist-minded people think that strict adherence to reality is the same thing as adhering to dogma. So while they claim that they are rejecting the "dogma" of Objectivism, what they are actually rejecting is reality. They are rejecting the notion that A is A.
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.
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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.
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17 hours ago, Easy Truth said:
Our interest is the cliche "a lasting peace" which requires behavior that convincingly discriminates between innocent vs. not innocent.
I find that many people think anything short of absolute war (ie flatten and delete the entire area) is self sacrificial, or is giving into terrorists. But that is a very shortsighted way of thinking, ignoring that this can in fact create more violence, or fail to secure individual rights. The US has improved in this regard since Vietnam, so even though I said killing no innocents is possible, my idea was that military actions can be more efficient over time.
I get what you are saying about indiscriminate killing, but it usually refers to a policy of killing without an attempt to distinguish who you kill. Anyway, the more important point is that Israel can and should do better. It's better overall to destroy less things, people included, it creates opportunity for growth and trade. Distinguishing who you kill is a good thing in war.
On 12/22/2023 at 6:05 PM, AlexL said:"Any decision" ?You have a very serious problem with your logic.
If you just want to nitpick that overall it is the government and not merely the military, fine. In that case, the Israeli government is completely incompetent, military included. I should have said those making military decisions are incompetent.
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1 hour ago, AlexL said:
So: you admit that are not a military expert, that you know - next to - nothing about the Israeli military.
I'm assuming you're saying this because you know something more than me. Rather than a cryptic message that simply implies facts that are out there, just tell me the facts that you are thinking of. Obviously not being an expert doesn't mean I know nothing.
But by comparison to other countries, how is it that, by your own number, Israel has not been able to shape up in 50 years?
1 hour ago, AlexL said:It is not the army that decides about the start of war, about its end, about the tactics, methods, rules of engagement etc.
Then the Israeli military is incompetent because generals and commanders are not able to make any decision without first asking for permission. (Or worse yet, people within the government without military expertise are telling military commanders to flatten Gaza when perhaps the intelligent military decision is something far more nuanced and calculated). I don't really think this is the case but going by your reasoning, this is what I would conclude.
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12 hours ago, Easy Truth said:
Perhaps no number will change your mind. Then perhaps the only solution is 2.5 million people.
6 million is perfect. Not just an ideal solution, but a final solution.
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11 hours ago, Easy Truth said:
That is the proof right there that indiscriminate killing is happening and you resist seeing that killing "some" indiscriminately is indiscriminate killing.
The point is indiscriminate killing as a policy, I think that's what he's getting at. Not a failure of discrimination, but no attempt at it. This follows from the premise of "all actions in self-defense are justified, any bad consequence is purely in the hands of the initiator" makes it so that making any discrimination is going to get in the way of self-defense. Therefore, the best action is always to flatten and delete entire regions, without regard for innocent civilians or collateral damage.
The fact is, that there is some rational limit is not really a barrier to self-defense. It's actually possible to negotiate with terrorists, not in the sense of giving them what they want, but taking advantage of their short-term goals so that your long-term goals win out in the end. With modern technology, we can be so discriminant that innocent deaths are almost always catastrophic failures, and sometimes engaging in war is not even necessary. Imagine destroying Hamas without killing any civilians. It is possible. This is a more effective way to dismantle modern terrorism.
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On 12/20/2023 at 5:55 PM, AlexL said:
Then show it! Are you a military expert? What level of knowledge do you have specifically about Israeli military?
Israel has been in a constant state of war with gaps of maybe only a few years. I can't think of examples of countries that are unable to defeat their enemies for such a long period of time. What more do you want me to say? You could try to blame Islamic fundamentalism as the only reason, but so many countries have even stopped that within their own borders (like in the Balkans) or stopped any further escalation of direct attacks (the US after 9/11). It's still an issue, but it's not a constant threat.
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10 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:
1) Where are you getting this from?
Reasoning in general. Being systematic, as in essentially and on purpose, rather than incidentally and ad hoc. I don't see how you can have an intent without an essential and purposeful goal.
14 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:It does not require you to prove that they are doing it well.
Of course not, that's not why I'm bringing up incompetency. I'm mentioning it because Alex seems to be insisting that Israel not only did nothing wrong, but that what they are doing is making meaningful progress toward safety or individual rights. The fact that Israel has practically always been in a state of war suggests that what it's doing is causing more conflict and making everything worse. If the idea is that Israel should be allowed to do literally anything to defend itself (even though you and I agree that there is a rational limit, Alex and others disagree), then what it does should actually work.
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2 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:
One must also prove that there is a "special intent", on the part of the perpetrators of the mass killing, to eradicate a people group as such.
This is my point about the first part, that special intent requires systematic effort. You can't have ad hoc special intent, and you could only establish it by pointing out systematic effort.
2 hours ago, AlexL said:What is your point? In any war, more so in a urban war in "the most densely populated area in the world", shit happens: friendly fire, breach of the rules of engagement.
At the absolute minimum, it's easy to show that Israel does not have a competent military.
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11 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:
The word "systematic" does not appear anywhere in the UN genocide convention.
1-4 is ad hoc without any particular organization besides a general attitude or culture of behavior. 5-10 are all by nature systematic things. If you want to get specific, your link talks about a cultural climate that genocide arises out of.
11 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:there was no special intent by any part of US leadership to destroy the Vietnamese people as such.
My Lai massacre. This is as much a genocide as anything based on what you're saying. Killing anything that moves. And not just a few soldiers that did it. I mean, clearly we are distinguishing forms of barbarism, but I'm saying the word genocide has to be something direct and pervasive. To an extent all war is about 'us' versus 'them' since the vast majority of wars are unjustified. All unjustified wars are in some way racist. Of wars that are only partially justified, you will still find people who support the war for racist reasons.
There seems to be a difference between starting a war with racist overtones, as opposed to merely exterminating. I mean, the founding charter of Hamas called for the extermination of Jews, not just the end of the Israeli state. If it was just the end of the Israeli state, that wouldn't be genocidal even though it would be still grounded in racism because of what Hamas thought about Jews. The extermination of Jews is genocidal, because that's not just seeking what they see as justice, or what they see as self-defense, but seeking out extermination in and of itself.
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52 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:
This is simply a description of how genocides typically occur
And importantly, it mentions the systematic nature of it, not in an ad hoc disorganized way. I'm thinking of Vietnam, where US soldiers did horrific things, but not perpetrated in a way that was systematic by the US military or cohesive across the US military. As bad as this was, and being probably racially motivated, it wasn't genocide. I don't think what you say is as clear as you make it out to be, other than being the horrific nature of war in general when bad actors do bad things.
52 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:Hunting down the third victim and then killing him after killing the first two, even though it was absolutely clear that none of them were a threat and were surrendering, is not incompetence by any stretch of the imagination.
How did the chain of command run here? Were the soldiers bad actors, ignoring orders or normal procedure? Could it be brought about by a culture of violence within the military that commanders fail to deal with, rather than overt orders to kill everybody on sight? That's what I mean by incompetence. Poor leadership and poor guidance on their own also lead to atrocities, like what happened in Vietnam.
52 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:Is anyone here going to sit there and seriously tell me that 87% of the Knesset cannot form a government against the ABSOLUTELY INSANE 13%?
I will watch the video. But the statement here doesn't indicate anything other than unwillingness to deal with internal threats to liberty.
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46 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:
I do not need to show evidence of all the other steps when we are clearly already at the extermination phase.
4-8 are missing. Even if you went all the way to 6, there is still not enough for it to be a genocide. Of course genocides don't happen instantly, there is a process, but you still have to establish that the intent is all the way to 9.
53 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:What???
Good thing you aren't then.
53 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:This is not an "error". This is systematic and has been going on for a long time.
Since I think it's hyperbole to say it's a genocide, my explanation is incompetency primarily.
55 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:This is a strawman argument.
You were condemning an entire government based on a minority group within that government. 13% is a sickening number for that kind of group, but to consider that explicit moral endorsement by the political decision-makers is entirely different. I'll take a look at your video, but from the sounds of what you told us, it just talks about one group, not the way that the Israeli government has incorporated the ideas of that group specifically.
Objectivism: my fall from reason??
in Questions about Objectivism
Posted
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.