Andrew Grathwohl

... and lots of money.

Some of the members here don't like references to fictional characters. I find it strange, but that's been my experience. One very fundamental fact of Objectivism is that it puts forth the understanding that the government holds a monopoly on retaliatory force.

Leave me out of any quarrels you may have with another member. My arguments stand on my own merits, and do not endorse the ideas being brought up by Sergio. I consider myself nothing more than a student of Objectivism. I'm only trying to learn here. However, I think it's rash to say I don't understand Objectivism; after all, I'm referencing Objectivist writings and am employing what I'd consider rational thinking and connecting my ideas to the principles that Objectivism teaches: objective reality, reason, self-interest, and capitalism (luckily, I haven't engaged any discussions with you dealing with art, because I can only imagine you'd offer me nothing). If you truly believe ideas are rational or irrational based on their own merits, then argue the ideas, not the labels. I think Sergio is getting frustrated by your unnecessarily blunt and nondescript posts which are certainly full of harsh words and labels, but seemingly lacking context, rational evidence, and background information. I think you should take a lesson from David Odden, because I find he's been extremely helpful, and comparatively nice, when engaging in discussions with other users. I am quite unsure of what it is you think you're getting out of these discussions when you seem so incredibly hostile, not just in your verbiage, but also in your rude manner of constructing thoughts and ideas in response to others.

I happen to find the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings unnecessary. The most convincing historical evidences that I've read have pointed out that Japan was going to surrender before the bombs were even dropped. Obviously it worked, but I still think if we were more sensible and rational in our actions, we could have arrived at a better solution than testing out our death bombs on them. Nothing in that quote you provided is anything I could disagree with. People are responsible for their own governments, regardless of whether the people agree with that government. You guys are both missing the point here - I am not arguing against a free nation invading a slave nation when it is in the free nation's best interest. I am arguing against ruthless and unnecessary cruelty brought upon people who are not, as individuals, acting aggressively against anybody - particularly when such strategy is potentially counterproductive, and most likely not helpful. I am arguing against the original analogy that was brought up, that was supposed to legitimize knowingly killing an entire city to accomplish one arguably non-important (when considering the long-run implications) goal. And neither of your quotes addressed Ms. Rand's favorable view on HOW we conducted ourselves in these conflicts. You both brought up justification for engaging in these conflicts - justifications that I completely agree with - but both of you failed to bring up Ayn Rand actually discussing the matter at hand. Nowhere in either of the Ayn Rand quotes you guys brought up did it specify her thoughts on the methods which we used to fight these battles. I, on the other hand, have shown you pretty solid evidence that Ayn Rand understood that individual rights must be recognized even if an individual's government fails to do so. Surely you can do better?

Nice fear mongering. I really don't care what happens to said terrorist on a physical level. I care about the consequences of utilizing torture as a legitimate strategy instead of focusing our resources and minds on a more trustworthy and useful method.

This is pretty pathetic evidence, and does not address the points that I've brought up. All you've done here is highlight some other unrelated truths. Please do some of your own thinking and show how this "evidence" relates to anything I've said, in the discussion of bombing an entire civilian population with the end goal to kill Hitler. Absolutely, if a free nation wishes to invade a slave nation, and if it is in their objective self interest, then they are allowed to do so. That wasn't the question at hand, however. Do you have something relevant to provide related to what we were actually talking about, or are you satisfied with just blurting out quotes and making baseless statements?

Of course, you engage in your first option. However, I find utilizing hypothetical situations is a bit of an unfounded method of getting ideas across. That being said, I don't agree with the analogy you describe, because when bombing an entire civilian population with the sole purpose of killing Hitler, you do so with the understanding that these people are civilians, not soldiers. People fighting in an army, forced or not forced, are engaging in aggression, and are therefore soldiers threatening your individual rights, whereas these supposed German citizens would be merely civilians, not individually engaging in any force against the US. The conscripts themselves are threats to your individual rights, so regardless of why they're involved in fighting you, they don't deserve any special treatment. Rand's quote couldn't be clearer, actually. If you have any evidence to counter mine, you'd be best to provide it. Otherwise, you stand out as merely appearing to be the usual loudmouth, offering nothing more than frivolous insults and childish superiority arguments. This is the usual unfounded, nondescript "evidence" I've come to expect from you. And please be more selective with your words. I did not say that England had a responsibility to "protect" the Germans' rights, nor did I say Ayn Rand said that. What I said was that regardless of whether or not a government chooses to recognize individual rights, the individuals living in those nations still possess them. This is also what Ayn Rand said in the quote I provided.

It would be wrong to say that killing Hitler would have done nothing, but I think that Hitler's rhetoric was ingrained in most Germans' minds by the time the war started, and his followers would have carried on without him until the bitter end. The Germans felt true hatred for the Allied powers because of how ashamed they were after WWI. The German nationalists simply used weakness this to their advantage. But I agree with your last point, in that I hope my message came out clearly; an intelligently-fought war is not necessarily analogous to a brutally-fought war. I agree that legitimate wars fought by a legitimate nation must be fought to win, but asserting this black-and-white notion that abandoning my respect for individual rights, and thereby legitimizing brutality, is just as legitimate of a way to win a conflict as one fought with valor and sophistication, is simply absurd. One may be able to embark upon multiple means to reach the same ends, and as Ayn Rand teaches us, it's the decisions we make in that ultimate quest - to live or not to live - that make our actions moral or immoral. We can assuredly choose to live by ruthlessly abandoning the respect we have for ourselves and our morals, group all individuals of a slave nation into one collectivist ideal, and abandon these principles to achieve a goal, but how does that not make us savages? Don't we remember that Ayn Rand makes individual rights very clear regarding slave nations like Nazi Germany and present-day Iran? A slave country has no national rights, but the individual rights of its citizens remain valid, even if unrecognized (from The Virtue of Selfishness).

Well, it's rather illogical to suggest that you "stop your attacker" when torturing somebody. You get something informative from it, but that's all. Torture isn't used as a means of ending aggression - it's used to further our knowledge of something which we can use against our enemy. It's a false conclusion to propose that torturing will directly lead to stopping your attacker. To put it in a more simplistic manner: If you torture your enemy, your enemy will remember it and be angered by it. Our objective in war is to remove the threat of the aggressor. If your enemy finds evidence of you torturing one of their own, that does not aid in the successful completion of the objective. The only "evidence" provided that torture works is from cases reported by our own government, which is not in any position to be trusted in giving us factual evidence. My agreement is that an Objectivist nation would not need to torture its enemies because its enemies would be defeated by superior tactics, strategies, technologies, weaponry, soldiers, and intelligence. Check your premises. Our enemies do not attack us because we're rich and free. I arrived at that conclusion because it's the truth. Torture is a method of last resort - it's not ordinary, and it's not routine. If our intelligence systems were more capable, we wouldn't need to rely on the fallible minds of easily-fallible men, broken by ruthless violence. It's far more reasonable to rely on intelligence gathered by intelligent men which can be easily used to draw a logical conclusion, than the uncertain word of a single person, brought out by brutal force, to gain information on your enemy. Surely, the CIA could have put more money into its intelligence technologies and employees, and less into researching torture methods and materials? Imagine how much better off we'd be if we had a better intelligence system in this country. It was the complete pathetic ineptness of our country's intelligence systems that allowed 9/11 to slip by this government. Better intelligence is obviously attainable, since we should have been able to EASILY thwart off that conflict. We have a long way to go in the development of our intelligence systems until we should be resorting to using torture; our intelligence systems could clearly stand to be overhauled entirely, what with their terrible track record and all.

I bet they will make Yaron a regular if he wishes to be! It was nice to see Schiff and Yaron having such a lively discussion - you could tell that they were agreeable on pretty much all the points brought up. I especially liked how they kind of finished each other's sentences, and qualified them with further input (like Schiff's remark on charity in relation to a moral Objectivist life). I really hope this man runs for Senate...

It would be terribly simplifying things to say that killing Hitler this way would have removed the threat of Nazi Germany. Hitler, the man, wasn't "the threat." The threat was the entire military force of the Axis powers. An action of this kind would not be a wise way to fight a war. Treating human life this cheaply, this savagely, just for the sake of killing a figurehead (without whom the war could obviously continue mostly uninterrupted), would be an extremely stupid way to fight a war, in fact. You would have suffered a great deal of blow back from this kind of action, as the Reich would have rationally made use of these events to further spread propaganda to the ordinary citizens, to convince them into further blindly supporting the immoral actions of Nazi Germany. A rational nation could have found a much better way to kill Hitler than to bomb an entire city full of German civilians. Also, much more obviously, Hitler would have never placed himself among the ordinary people during WWII. He was occupying various FHQ locations pretty much the entire time Germany was involved in combat, which were located in and among military sites to give him command. As you would assume, these headquarters were also pretty well-protected.

As I said in my post, I think you're more likely to CAUSE a terrorist attack, not prevent one. Once your enemy learns you're torturing, you bring them up to a point of anger which they can never return from. We use torture to get information out of somebody because there is no other way to gather it. We hear proponents of it being termed a "last resort." If this is so, and if you say coercing information out of somebody is the way we are to prevent a terrorist attack, then wouldn't you say that's a pretty clear indication that we have some very troubling holes in our intelligence community? Why can't we pick this information up? Why can't the legal CIA get information that illegal torture methods can? Simply put, if a nation is torturing, then there is something wrong with its utilizations of modern technology - technologies which come from the mind, and not brutal actions that stem from the barrel of a gun or the clenched fist of some mindless soldier. In an objectivist government, nobody would torture. Their intelligence systems would be stellar enough that any information we'd need to gather would be sufficiently done so by those groups. They would understand that the people they're torturing have pathetic, useless minds, which will not give in to this kind of pain. They would understand that the irrationality of the Middle East, and of religion in general, is not something we can deal with. Self-defensive force, a rational foreign policy, and active intelligence communities would be enough to thwart any potential attacks. This.

The reason why savage countries torture individuals, for any reason related to finding out information or gaining intelligence, is to replace their minds with their brute hands. I don't accept torture ever, because if the idea is to gain intelligence on some matter important to national security, then the goal should be to use our minds to gather this intelligence. In no way will lowering ourselves to the brutish level of the person we're torturing help matters, and it will likely get confessions out of people that are false, and worse yet, will incite more hatred towards us. When we watch savages beheading American citizens on TV, it makes us angered and incite more force upon these types of individuals. This doesn't matter to them, because they're OK with dying. They're so propped up by religious propaganda that they have no fear of death. They want to die. When the savages hear of us acting savagely, though, it may bring about more violence and harm to American people or interests, and of course, we love our lives and fear death. The trade-off is not in our best interests.

That's an interesting take on this issue - very profound, actually. Do you suggest with this evidence, then, that we have selective or closed borders? If welfarism is only a distortion up to a certain point, then should an Objectivist nation allow immigrants who only are in search of liberty (and thus, prosperity, production, etc.), or does an Objectivist nation choose to accept all who wish to enter, even without the guarantee that they are after liberty? I just wonder which position is more conducive to capitalism. If we control who enters and leaves the country, do we thusly control the markets and the economy?

I could absolutely see how the argument could be made that free, lawful immigration could be in the Objectivist nation's best interests, if it was done so without any special treatment. Anybody who wants to join the Objectivist nation would theoretically be fed up with whatever non-Objectivist nation they're fleeing from, and would wish to utilize their skills in a nation of Objectivism. If that were the case, and if the citizen were law-abiding, I could not see how this could be anything but positive for a nation founded on an Objectivist government.

What's worse is that the only people who are going to be affected by this - the elderly, people in remote locations, and other people who have no choice but to use antennae to get television signals, are the very same ones who will either be unable to switch, or will not be knowledgeable of the requirement to switch altogether. I wonder what the government's true motive is in forcefully phasing out analog broadcast signals...

Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Are you denying the existence of ethnicities within Judaism? Are you doing so with your only argument being that Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia? If you even cared about being right, you could have easily gone to the references section of the Wikipedia article for your non-manipulatable sources. The fact is, the reason why DNA studies are so complete and sophisticated for a relatively small population of the world as the Jews is because ethnic Jews are highly aware of their genetic backgrounds. I, for example, am and Ashkenazim. My good family friends are Sephardi. Every Jew, atheist or not, practicing or not, religious or secular, knows their ethnic background within the Jewish framework. http://countrystudies.us/israel/49.htm http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt161g.htm What are you doing espousing Objectivism with that kind of madness behind your "logic"? I specifically replied that the only connection between these events is that they all were practitioners of Islam. That's not a very significant connection at all, if you could even get away with justifying that as a connection to begin with.

Just thought I'd share my latest musical works with the group here. The two tracks posted on my MySpace are from my latest suite, "The Circular Consciousness Suite" composed for Violin, two Cellos, and Computer. I would love to hear any comments about them, particularly from an aesthetic point of view as it relates to Objectivism! If anybody would like the full album that these tracks appear on, please let me know and I'll provide you with a link to the FLAC version. http://www.myspace.com/brokenheartsonice Enjoy, guys and girls!

I think it's a totally fair thing to mention how it hasn't only been Jews that have raped and pillaged in the name of reclaiming their holy land, Israel. You misuse the term "package-dealing" in a pretty incredibly way. Package-dealing has been what a lot of you in this thread have been doing this whole time, by relating the various attacks, formulated by VARYING groups of Islamic people, against US and Western interests over the past century to the conclusion that we must use physical force against Iran. When you people justify nuclear bombing Iran by citing the Barbary Wars, 9/11, and the Little Rock, AR shootings, I cannot think of a better term for such absurdity than package-dealing.

Any Jew would tell you this is absolutely, unequivocally false. Please see the Wikipedia article for Jewish Ethnic Divisions. Your point? Countless groups of people have been persecuted many times - that doesn't mean they deserve racist treatment or favoritism. Why should they? Countries are free to impose whatever rules for their borders that they want. It is perfectly reasonable for a country to deny a person citizenship or access to their land if they don't meet the qualifications that the LAND OWNERS specify. If France wanted to keep people with yellow teeth out of their country, that's their foolish decision - and that's none of our business. I like this Wrath guy - way to use your head.

I think a lot of this depends on how right and left politics are defined. After all, if we're trying to be traditional, we would consider classical liberals (the old political right) as being the ones defending individual liberties, freedom, and capitalism all at once. Murray Rothbard, Barry Goldwater, and that whole ilk. If we're looking at the new political left and right, we'd be looking at pretty much two of the same party, and then it would be pretty much impossible to play Objectivist political views on any such line. This is because, unlike the new political left and right, Objectivist political views are substantiated in defense of a particular moral code, and political principle - both things that are nonexistent in mainstream political thought.

I may be making this up, but I thought I'd read that Halley's concertos were supposed to be homages to Shostakovich's pieces, which, at the time of writing Atlas Shrugged, were getting similar responses to Halley's concertos in the book. If I am just making this up, then I think more to the point, Shostakovich's music is a very pertinent example of Ayn Rand's preferred art aesthetics, and is even more relevant since, at the time, it was new music. In the late 50s, Shostakovich was debuting quite a few concertos (particularly for piano and cello), was utilizing his newly-found style of post-romanticism in the context of a soviet Russia which he despised. Sadly, he didn't live up to this grand image for very long, as in 1960 he officially joined the Communist party, despite their banning the majority of his works within the country of Russia. Regardless, I think that if you want to hear some very Halley-esque music, in the tradition of what is described in Atlas Shrugged, you may want to check out the following Shostakovich works: Opus 110: String Quartet No. 8 in C minor (1960) Opus 102: Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major (1957) Opus 103: Symphony No. 11 in G minor The Year 1905 (1957) Opus 107: Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major (1959) It is a great idea to pick up the complete String Quartets from this composer, as they are what he's best known for, and arguably his most brilliant collection of works.

Why don't we take a look at the innumerable examples of absolute, wretched failure by the Bush administration.... Then consider the likelihood that they would be successful in committing the worst terrorist attack in this country's history on its own people, in the middle of broad daylight, in the busiest and most economically-vibrant city in the country. I know, this isn't much of a rational argument, but the humor behind this is still amusing to me...

Jazz (Bop, Hard-Bop, Post-Bop, Free, Modern Improvisation, and some Fusion), Classical (Early Music, Romantic, and the European electroacoustic composers... my favorite composers of all time are Mahler, Brahms, Shostakovich, Stockhausen, and Steve Reich), Electronic/Computer Music (Alva Noto, Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker, Fennesz, Squarepusher, Venetian Snares, Brian Eno, Ryoji Ikeda), North-Indian Hindustani music, West-African music, Afrobeat, 50s-70s Funk, the American Avant-Garde (John Zorn, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Steve Coleman, Ikue Mori, Mary Halvorson, et. al), Tuvan/Tibetan overtone singing, Pakistani Quaali music (especially Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), some adventurous and experimental hip hop / dub (The Bug, Saul Williams, Gill-Scott Heron, Prefuse 73, Beans), some Post-Rock (Sigur Ros - not the new album, God Speed! You Black Emperor, Battles), pre-60s blues music (Lightnin' Hopkins is my favorite), and even some singer-songwriter, pop and electro-pop (Justice, Gnarls Barkley, Ratatat, Neil Young, Nirvana, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, Buddy Holly, Tom Waits, Todd Rundgren, Led Zeppelin, and Talking Heads).

What? 4:01 into this video, Ayn Rand unequivocally shows how you're wrong. My point was exactly what she said: That you cannot ever be asked to prove a negative, and that religion is immoral because it is mystical. But if there was 100% solid evidence that a god existed, that wouldn't be mystical anymore, would it? Quit while you're ahead. This is the easiest of all battles for me to win even without having to stoop to your level of undeserved pretension, pompousness, and name-calling.