Doug Huffman
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Posts posted by Doug Huffman
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Hi ya fellow Newbie.
You phrased your question in terms of "belief." If you reconsidered the same issues in terms of faith, might that be illuminating? Do you have faith in the natural or the supernatural, or can you hold both in your mind simultaneously? Do you have faith in the rational or can there be faith in the irrational?
Ayn Rand's fiction is exciting and inspiring, but only opens the door to her non-fiction expositions of philosophy. Read on, read to discover the roots of our modern dilemma and Immanuel Kant's 220 year old curse. Objectivism suffers the same controversies of orthodoxy and progressivism that torment us all.
My brother struggled with addiction until he transferred it to his "Savior." I am disturbed by my faith in my rationality.
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Apropos this thread, I just finished Rand's The Argument from Intimidation. HO Ho ho. "Only those who lack finer instincts can fail to accept the morality of altruism."
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Can a monopoly develop in an actually free market? What definition of monopoly permits competitors? Capitalism qua free market functions properly only with an educated and skeptical market. Inducing from - oops, lunch is on, more later.
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I love it! "Compromise is failure on the installment plan." Often I go on about when dealing with implacable enemies, physics and gravity are the most adamant and immovable of obstacles.
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Well, I haven't missed TV. The internet is a tool and no more. If someone tries to sell me Web 10.0 when I was fine with Web 1.0, what am I missing? Believe nothing that you hear or read without verifying it yourself unless it fits your preexisting world view.
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Thank you.
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Chinese motorway collapses after just two days
A Chinese motorway has collapsed just two days after it opened, causing the deaths of two people, after builders were ordered to rush the project so it could be unveiled for the 90th birthday of the Communist party.
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Should not the category be also accepted or rejected on its merits? Aren't the individual and the categorical being confused, or, at least, conflated here? We cannot dictate the attributes of an existent but we must evaluate them relative to some principled standard. The highest value being life and its nadir is non-life sterility.
Objectivism is objective, A is A. If a predicate 'A' is rejected then so is the subject 'A' rejected. The chain of reasoning may be tortured and long but it is implacable.
I am a novice here. If I am in error then please demonstrate it. I directed the operation of small nuclear power plants, very much from the volumes of principles and procedures analogous to Objectivism's orthodox literature. "Back to basics" was a good aphorism when tough decisions had to be made, be they personal, technical or professional.
ETA: I saw "primary texts" twelve minutes after the post. I agree.
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I am claiming nothing about Street View in particular, others are. Here is another instance; http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/science/7651086.html - hit number one of many from searching on "Google's best shot at muscling into a market".
I would have the Death's Door passage be my 'good fence', that makes good neighbors, and perhaps analogous to the Galt's Gulch camouflage field. Unfortunately Google Street View uses its economic might to peek over the fence with a camera and sell the data.
So, Objectively, is there an individual right to privacy, might it not be integral to the right to property? The protection of intellectual property is certainly controversial now-a-days.
We have only the rights that we defend. I will not willingly speak with a government agent, insisting instead that he establish his legalistic control over my person via reasonable articulable suspicion and/or probable cause.
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It is unfortunate that I cannot reiterate my experiences on the web, that's why I tried to point to a site that shares my concerns but based on their own conclusions rather than on my experiences. Again, in a word, they wish to profit from abuse of my privacy and security. See http://epic.org/privacy/streetview/ for one global instance.So what is your problem with Google and MS and for that matter AOL? Why have you decided that they are not at all trustworthy (or so it would seem)?
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I do not trust anything G00gle. I have the same problem with G00gle as with AOL, M$, and all who would profit by compromising my privacy and security. Read Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF.org.
I have used, for instance, SCROOGLE Scraper https since they came on line. http://www.scroogle.org/ https://ssl.scroogle.org/index.html
Federated social networking may be described in the Wikipedia, as may be DIASPORA. I believe that there is an open invitation at poddery.com [email protected] We, DIASPORA and me, are still growing. I seem to have to have a defaced book account and a tweeter account but use them very charily.
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Maybe the ethics can be found in a closer look at police interactions.
Having only the Fourth and Fifth Amendment Rights that we defend, an objective individual must first evaluate his contact with the state's enforcement agents. Broadly speaking, they may not demand anything from a citizen not detained for cause.
Perhaps more fundamentally, this is an is/ought. We ought to embrace our fellows that are peace officers. Unfortunately they is corrupted by the leviathan.
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I'm pretty sure that Rand/Objectivists have no issue with homosexuality as a chosen lifestyle. As the categorical, though, homosexuality does not value life - per se it is sterile.
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Some of my attraction to Rand/Objectivism is for guidance in distancing myself from libertarianism. As my political study and growth have led me further and farther from what Ayn Rand would agree is the left, it has become essential to carefully disassociate from libertarianism.
About personal nuclear weapons; it would be amusing to dispose of expended nuclear fuel by giving it away with the proviso that it be hand carried away. The hysteria of Radioactive Dispersal Devices, "dirty bombs", would be lessened by some understanding of mass specific activity.
I would be interested in seeing a Objective analysis of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms developed here or, if it exists, a citation that I could access. My political dot.sig; good people ought to be armed as they will, with wits and Guns and the Truth.
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G00gle+ has joined my family of filters. Try federated social networking - DIASPORA* [email protected]
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Hello neighbor. It is a great place to live!
There are plenty of challenges peculiar to the Island, and plenty that come across 'the Door.' If I could just shield the Island from the world, if we could just vote the moochers and looters off, then maybe Rand's Utopia becomes possible.
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Thank y'all for the kind welcomes.
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I misremembered apparently that I had made my introduction.
I am 62, long retired, and an intellectual-wannabe. I have re-read AS and Galt's speech but only recently engaged Rand's non-fiction and Objectivism's secondary literature, Peikoff, Harriman, S. R. C. Hicks (I particularly appreciate Hicks).
I have been a conservative polemicist but struggled with the distance from libertarianism. Objectivism seems to ease my mind on that account but then requires reevaluation of my Platonism. So I have lots of thinking, study and reconsideration - and late in life, maybe too late in life.
I retired from federal civil service as a nuclear engineering technician (position) shift test engineer (title equivalent to private industry "start up engineer"). I have on the job training said to be equivalent to a postgraduate degree http://www.navsea.navy.mil/shipyards/norfolk/nnsy/NuclearTED.aspx I was educated during the testing era with +4 s.d. evaluations.
Ten years after retirement I married and moved to my isolated and rural Island with 800 neighbors.
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Just as concentration is the source of materials existent in the real environment, dilution is the solution to pollution. Each person must rationally decide what is pollution and how much to commit, evaluating the cost/benefit. Traditional education has failed the rational.
Critical Thinking Skills
in Metaphysics and Epistemology
Posted
Thinking relates and correlates. It is only critical when a concept is compared to a principled standard and rejected or accepted on that basis.