Edwin

Should i hire a person who did an M.A. in Critical Studies from USC because he speaks mandarin and thai? i need a mandarin speaking person to negotiate in china. The problem is he shows altruistic tendencies. He thinks companies should practice corporate social responsibility. And my company can potentially go against the grain of political correctness.

I recently read the Elliot Rodger's essay - "My Twisted World". I won't link to it or quote from it, because I don't want to popularize his ideas. But I do want to criticize it. What struck me the most the is that Mr. Rodger believed that consciousness had primacy over existence. His dad bought him the book - "The Secret" which is about something called "Law of Attraction" which is about how "wishing makes it so". Although he says he knew in the back of his mind, that the idea "wishing makes it so" is wrong, he wanted to believe in it. He wished for everything he wanted like the book instructed, including winning a lottery to make him rich. Of course he did not win the lottery. And he was disappointed in the Universe for not granting him his wishes. He also mentions the book - "The Power of the Subconscious Mind", which is yet another book like "The Secret" and is about how we can wish things to be the way we want it to be. One of his unstated premises I can read between his lines, is that there is a mechanism which enforces a type of cosmic egalitarianism among all sentient beings. He feels this agency has been unjust towards him. And he feels jealousy and hatred towards people who have been benefited more due to luck than due to skill. Another of his unstated premises is that the universe always rewards him for his commitment, sincere effort and suffering. He sought too much approval from his friends, and there was no one to tell him he shouldn't seek sanctions and approvals from other people. I think these ideas were dangerous, and to the degree he believed in them can create a huge disappointment, which can lead to a "revolution of rising expectations" like the one he experienced. Perhaps there is also a bit of blame to be placed on "society" for making him think relationships are mandatory for everyone, and a right granted by the universe. Perhaps we should stop preaching to everyone, that everyone should have a girlfriend/boyfriend, and that everyone should be in a stable relationship. Perhaps it is normal to be single, and even lonely.

I am aware "alpha" isn't like we speak of alpha-males in animals. Our species don't have alpha males. A lot of species of apes don't have alpha males either. I just wanted to describe this indescribable quality of men who are successful with women. Women call it "men who make me laugh", "men who are funny". I mean the bearded guy in this video:

In that case, I think I would be justified then to use, religious lies to motivate/manipulate religious people around me. altruist lies, to make people run after altruist goals which will end up benefiting me. a sermon designed to induce unjustified guilt, to make people feel powerless against me. Because they are being irrational by not rewarding my competence, and by trying to make me act irrationally so as to earn rewards from them. Quid pro quo. Agree? Just as we should use violence to retaliate against violence. Why not use weaknesses-es due to irrationality against the irrational? It is just like how we make money of of bad traders in the market.

I want the world to be a certain way. As a programmer I like well organized code and by that I mean, code without side-effects everywhere, code without mutable state everywhere. As a professional I like to be appreciated for my competence, and rewarded based on it. As a man, I like women to love me for what I have to offer: my competence, productivity, security, stability, support etc. (I am aware women don't want these, I will come to that later). As a philosopher/political being, I like my ideas to be accepted based on its consistency and correspondence with reality. Unfortunately, the world isn't that way. As a programmer, I have to put up with miles of spaghetti code, and be accused for what my predecessors did. As a professional, I routinely meet people who do nothing productive, nor are they competent, yet they are given positions of power and influence over the competent people. As a man, I routinely meet women who consider competent, productive, stable, supportive men as too boring, and not worth loving. They are after "alpha" men, men who are none of these. As a philosopher/political being, my ideas are either ignored or stolen without acknowledgement. Inconsistent and plain wrong ideas prevail. At what point should I start/stop trying to create the world I like, and start/stop accepting the way it is now?

To whomever it may concern: The reddit /r/objectivism has been hijacked by anarchist moderators. /u/JamesShrugged is an anarchist who wants to start his own flavor of Objectivism called AnarchObjectivism. He started his own subreddit called /r/AnarchObjectivism /u/ParahSailin the original moderator has now promoted /u/JamesShrugged as a moderator. /u/ParahSailin also has anarchist leanings, as evidenced by the fact that he removed my post to introduce my own satirical subreddits named /r/christianobjectivism /r/islamicobjectivism and /r/cafeteriaobjectivism /u/ParahSailin and /u/JamesShrugged are anarchists who are now moderators of /r/objecctivism. They are using it to promote their own version of objectivism. Sorry to trouble you with all these petty politics.

In case of the clients too I am too lazy to think if something is a new request, or already included. People are so covert and manipulative always I am too tired to fight each of their stratagems, so I agree to everything they say, until I start passively protesting when they want more and more.

I would ask him to always think about his own welfare, and analyze every situation carefully before agreeing to or accepting it. He will need to practice, because he is prone to turning the other cheek and accepting what the world is doing to him. If he thought deeper he wouldn't need to blow up at the last moment, he will be able to blow up in slow motion, nip the problems he would face if he let things be, and stay in control. I am either a total push-over or a control freak. A part of me does ask me to be analyze and do what is good for me when giving the bike, but I refuse to do what is good for me, and turn the other cheek. I guess I have turned the other cheek for so long, I am unable to not do it.

Examples: A relative/friend of mine asks me to practice a certain religious rite. I do not believe in the said religion. A shrewd person would navigate his way out of this predicament, without causing undue & permanent opposition. A couple of friends wants to borrow my bike from me. I know they do not borrow bikes from others, and are asking me because I am easy to be manipulated. A shrewd person would be able to exit from this situation by cracking jokes which are not meant and taking it lightly. My client tries to change the project requirements when my manager is not around. They wouldn't try that on my manager because he is shrewd. The only way I know to fight this is with a response that will help me earn their permanent hatred. Don't tell me I shouldn't be afraid of people. I have tried not being afraid of people. And they hurt me in unison. Now I am just passive aggressive.

I lack shrewdness and tact. It shows, and it is obvious. I am always the victim, because people are constantly tempted to manipulate me. I know they are manipulating me, but I only know drastic responses to being manipulated: to burn bridges, to sink boats, to shrug, to be lazy, to procrastinate. I can't handle people who manipulate me without offending them. Should I change? I have switched around 5 jobs because of this. It is easy to get a job but hard to keep it.

Sometimes when I get tired of not being able to convince people about the existence of Objective reality and our capacity to know it, I push them into a D2 from their D1. And watch them squirm to find footing. I seem to enjoy the sight of their philosophical frustration because they refused to be I. Is that moral? Sometimes I feel it is Justice that they suffer, and I should not be merciful.

Even before I read Atlas Shrugged, I have always thought of myself as Eddie Willers. I have a crush on the same girl as long as I can remember, but she married someone else, although she knows how I feel. I like to do charity occasionally, but it is not the purpose of my life. I am pretty damn serious about morality, but I lack something that my heroes have. My heroes can deal with anyone. I can't. I can only deal with a certain kind of people. And this has always been my Achilles heel.

What if one declares the Supreme Being to be his own self? Is everything else in Freemasonry aligned with Objectivism? I ask this because based on a guess I have a feeling that Freemasonry requires it's members to stick to anti-Objectivist ideas like unchosen obligations towards others in the fraternity.

Have there been any attempts to automate Concept Formation or Measurement Omission or identification of Conceptual Common Denominators? I understand that concept formation requires volition, which has not yet been automated. But surely someone would have tried to automate some automatic element of concept formation no?

Do the following rights exist? Or are they needs misunderstood as rights? 1. the right to anonymity. 2. the right to "not being recognized/identified without consent". 3. the right to privacy. Recently German government banned Facebook's use of face recognition for auto tagging. They & others cited the above rights as justification. I am wondering whether what the German government did is moral.

He paid less than the contractually agreed amount the last time.

Thanks. I do not need his business badly because I already have a contract with a huge hedge fund in HK to develop what they need. So I think, I shouldn't sacrifice my priciples like you say. Thanks for helping me think through this. Wish I could pay people in here LOL!

I do not consider my innocence in this matter debatable. Nor do I need his sanction of my innocence, Therefore I see no reason to confront him about this. He himself knows and remembers what he has done.

Not sure if it is petty: The last time we engaged in a business relationship it went like this: He found a buyer for a custom made software, asked me to make it, while he guided me according to his client's wishes. He went missing in action for a month after lying to me that his client had some changes to the original plan they needed to discuss and plan for a month while I had to wait for the new plans. When he came back he accused me as the reason why he missed deadlines of his client. When in fact it was he who caused an "artificial" delay so as to accuse me. In the words, I'm sure he is a liar and does not wish to accept guilt which is his, but instead expects me to accept it. If I pretend to do so I get to engage in another mutually beneficial relationship.

Is it moral to associate with a person for mutual gain, when he expects you to accept a guilt over matters which I am innocent? He expects me to accept an unearned guilt. As a reward / benefit I get to engage in a business deal for mutual benefit. I can pretend to accept the said guilt, so as to engage in mutually beneficial relationship. It is just that something does not feel right. Can somebody help me think through this?

The Indian government had its heavy hand on every aspect of the Bhopal plant, from its design and construction to its eventual operation. Initially, the facility merely imported raw pesticides, such as one called Sevin, and then diluted, packaged and shipped them. This was a relatively safe and simple operation. But, in accordance with industrial policy, Union Carbide was under constant pressure from the government to cut imports and reduce the loss of foreign exchange. To do this, Carbide was required by its state-issued operating license to transfer to the Bhopal facility the capability to manufacture the basic pesticides and, subsequently, even their ingredients. Everything was to be “Swadeshi.” i.e. “Indianized.” Even the chemical production processes used in Bhopal were developed by Indian researchers . To produce Sevin, carbon tetrachloride is mixed with alpha-naphthol and a chemical known as methyl isocyanate, or MIC (the chemical that leaked in the accident). Liquid MIC is a highly unstable and volatile chemical, and a deadly toxin. . . . MIC was not required in Bhopal while the factory simply packaged Sevin, its final product. But the logic of “industrial self-sufficiency” and “technology transfer” required the manufacture of Sevin from scratch—and that meant dealing with its hazardous ingredients, including MIC. So in 1971, the Union Carbide factory opened a small plant to manufacture alpha-naphthol, and began to import and store MIC—a chemical which never had to be in India in the first place, except to satisfy the Indian government. In 1977, based upon projections of growing demand, the Bhopal factory began to increase its alpha-naphthol facilities dramatically. A new $2.5 million plant—designed, of course, by an Indian consulting firm—was built. Ten times larger than most similar plants, it at once displayed design problems of scale: equipment would not work or would turn out to be the wrong size. Ultimately, faced with an inoperable alpha-naphthol facility, the factory’s management decided to [open an MIC production facility in 1980]. What had begun as a Carbide subsidiary for packaging pesticides was now a government-directed business manufacturing and storing a deadly chemical in a technologically backward culture. Those were not business decisions. Those were political decisions. One last element of government policy helped lay the groundwork for the pending disaster. The area around the plant had been deserted at the time Carbide moved in. But in 1975 the local government, in a re-zoning scheme, encouraged thousands of Indians to settle near the plant by giving them construction loans and other inducements. In effect, government first helped to make the plant unsafe, and then drew the people into the path of the coming gas cloud. Add to all this the fact that after the plant was opened, the technologically trained Americans who built and ran it were sent packing and were replaced by under-educated locals—most of them friends, relatives, and cronies of local officials. They allowed operations to continue despite the fact that all five redundant safety systems had been broken for months. One of the incompetents let water from a hose leak for hours into one of the chemical tanks, which caused a dangerous reaction. The night-shift employees were all sipping tea in the lunch room while gauges indicating rising gas pressure in the tank went off the top of the scale—allowing a pipe to rupture and gush deadly gas into the sleeping community nearby. No, the Bhopal disaster was not the result of American capitalism: no American capitalists were permitted to be present at or in control of the plant. The gas leak was instead the result of technology decisions and subsidies directed by politicians. Source: “Bhopal: The Fruit of Industrial Policy,” July 19, 1985 The Intellectual Activist, Vol. 4, No. 2 later excerpted by the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 3, 1986.

I am thinking of Rand's definition of justice when I talk about unjustified suffering. The idea that any person has to suffer consequences of events one had no choice about, is strikingly similar to the disgusting idea of Original Sin, and, therefore unjustifiable. Certain diseases are consequences of events which no one has had any choices about. For example, cluster headaches, which is considered to be the most painful disease human beings suffer has no known causes linking it to the actions of any person. And therefore I believe it is moral to end such suffering by developing better painkillers or more preventive solutions. I believe if we walk along that path of discovery we will be able to end all unjustified human suffering. Yet I have had people tell me that it is unrealistic and therefore irrational & immoral to pursue such a goal in life.

I hate unjustified human suffering. I believe it is unnecessary. I think it possible to end it through better medicine, diagnostics, charity and law enforcement. Is it rational or moral to pursue such a goal?

Opponents of this free market proposal claim that wealthier groups (countries, races, classes, sexes etc) will have all the organs from poorer groups and so poorer groups will have lesser means to exercise their right to life. Other opponents claim it would lead to Organ farming or bad actors trying to deceive potential donors or straight-up kill people for their organs. Proponents argue that the above problems can be solved through a regulated free market, which provides the benefit of easy access to organs (no need to rely on someone's goodwill, just pay) without foul-play. What is the Objectivist viewpoint on these views?

The fact is that we don't find ourselves everyday in a position where we have no choice but to protect that which we value the most by destroying ourselves because someone else is choosing to destroy it. Most people are benign and merely desire to live and let live. Criminals are the anomaly, not the norm. Or else there would more people inside jails than outside it and insurance companies won't make any money. So there is very little need to derive ethics from such rare scenarios, precisely because they are rare. e.g. How would you divide the only slice of bread between you and your partner on a lifeboat? Answer: We don't find ourselves everyday in lifeboat with a slice of bread. So normative behavior under such circumstances must not be subject matter of ethics. Ethics should concern itself with behavioral norms that is conducive for the life of a rational man. Having said that, it is not a sacrifice to die for something/someone/"some idea" you would value more than your own life. However it is sacrifice to die for something/someone/"some idea" which you hate or don't know or is irrational and therefore impossible.