Mister A

I am of the opinion that there are no 'causes' where free will is concerned but only choices and influences. So I believe that outside of the most viciously abusive upbringing or physical brain damage an evil parent can inflict on a toddler, the public education/university system can only act as an enabler of students and faculty who are predisposed to irrationality (i.e. removing some of the immediate consequences of being a malignant whim-worshipper) while alienating and punishing those who choose to be rational. Even someone who unquestioningly swallows the crap he's fed at a university may be driven to do some retro-active premise checking when exposed to the real world; that would be entirely his choice and if he chooses to remain irrational, not even the prospect of starvation would sway him. I don't think a school could get away with the sort of heavy-handed brainwashing and isolation that cults inflict upon their followers. Thoughts?

There's a section early on in part 3 (chapter 1 or 2) where Dagny is given the choice of living with Francesco and renewing their romance or living with Galt her current love. She leaves the choice to Galt who gently rebuffs Francesco. Rand then describes a hypothetical situation if the alternative happened with all three lovers having their values denied and desperately evading reality to ease the pain: Dagny still loving Galt while forcing herself to settle for Francesco, Francesco consciously fooling himself that Dagny still loves him and Galt sacrificing his love as a 'duty' on behalf of his friend. Yeah, Rand's philosophy on relationships strains credibility especially when you take into account her own checkered personal life but she does have a point that a lot of reality evasion goes on in relationships. In the end, it was reality and Dagny's entitlement of choice that Rearden valued over his own feelings for her.

Sounds a lot like Jim Taggart's marriage; it was okay for him to go slumming with a lower-class girl who would supposedly give him unconditional admiration but he cut her down whenever she would dare transcend her dependent status.

Wow. Just reading the plot summary on wiki made my skin crawl.

Regardless of her caliber as a politician and executive, she and her family did not deserve the vicious personal attacks the media subjected them to for no better reason than because she dared to compete with their cult leader.

If a significant number of circumcised boys were experiencing and reporting chronic pain or dysfunction as a direct result of circumcision, that could be grounds for a ban. What is certainly not grounds is for someone to march into a police station and declare "I don't like what my Jewish neighbors are doing. DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!"

Yes but it's not government's responsibility to placate the outrage of an outside observer.

There is no justification because it is religious mysticism. There is already a consensus here that religion is intrinsically anti-rational and it's unnecessary to reach this consensus by fixating on one single custom and demonizing it into something it is not. You don't fight irrationality with irrationality.

I think the problem is a tendency to sanctify the phallus; equating even an inconsequential alteration as castration.

I'll add further that severing a newborn's umbilical cord or injecting it with a life-saving vaccine also fit the literal definition of concepts like 'mutilate' and 'initiation of force'. The only thing that makes circumcision different is that it is unnecessary; not brutal or crippling just unnecessary and I doubt I would want it to happen to my own son. So what this conflict boils down to is histrionic outrage versus rigid traditionalism; A fight any rational person should sit out from. Yes, words have meanings that are meant to be consistent with observable reality but fetishizing literal definitions and using a dictionary as a crutch is evading the use of your own judgment.

Experience is not meant to change reality but to provide a frame of reference in case someone comes along throwing emotive adjectives and waving a dictionary in my face like it's a magic wand in a crude attempt to convince me that A is non-A. Since you seem to be intent on emoting and name-calling there's nothing to engage in a meaningful way.

Whenever there is a conflict between my experiences and the huffy feelings of someone else who never shared my experiences but is reacting to an abstraction, what do you expect me to think? I see you bring up 'definition' so I would appreciate if you didn't reply with a dictionary quote like many trolls here do. I don't fetishize semantics. Who are you addressing exactly?

There seems to be a wide disconnect between the outrage expressed here and the experiences of men who were circumcised. I'm cut myself and don't feel like I've been deformed or anything. I also don't recall seeing any victim testimonials about it. Perhaps some premise-checking is in order.

As in preventing traces of waste from accruing in the foreskin?

This was actually presented in one of my film studies courses...

Is that seriously how you interpreted all those replies???

The ending was not the defeat of Tyler's ideology; the bombs went off anyway. It was a victory for the narrator's psyche because he no longer needed Tyler to be content with his own life and had the option to continue Tyler's work as his own.

Years ago, I was fascinated with Fight Club and it's anarchistic themes. At the time, I was rotting away in a 'dead-end' job and welcomed the wish-fulfillment. It's only in hindsight and the context of experience do I realize how anti-rational and misanthropic it was; Tyler Durden is essentially a cult leader who employs charisma and brute force to impose his primitivist utopia that he believes to somehow be an enlightened state of living. It's only for his focus on property damage and civil disruption do I refrain from calling him a terrorist but he was close to that distinction and would have inevitably resorted to murder if left to his own devices. However, Bad Lieutenant plummets to new lows of altruist propaganda. A corrupt cop investigates the rape of a nun who forgives the offenders. He can't wrap his head around how such an atrocity can be forgiven but it gives him hope that he can be redeemed for his own scumbag life. He finds the rapists and after terrorizing them at gunpoint he gives them $30k that was intended for a gambling debt and a bus ticket out of town. At the end, the 'selfless hero' is shot to death by the gangsters he owed the money to.

I liked the one where he's bitching over Half-Life episode 3 xD

MJ really died after Dangerous; his sanity and productivity freefalled since. I'm actually amazed he physically lasted as long as he did.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the anti-life aspect of mystics; do they want to stop living as their mundane selves via immersion into escapist fantasy (which I can somewhat relate to) or are they just flat-out suicidal in a malignant way that seeks to drag others to the grave with them?

I can't tell what's more horrific: the US president being an icy sociopath or the public's indifference to it.

I can't tell what's more horrific: the US president being an icy sociopath or the public's indifference to it.

Rand detailed this mindset exhaustively. The worst thing you can do is 'charitably' attribute it to innocent naivety or neurosis; you will end up with a knife in your back.

Something like this: http://www.drudgereport.com/flashaot.htm