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Dante

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Everything posted by Dante

  1. Apparently you missed the points of both of my posts... 1. If this is simply for your collection of observation, and you're not trying to 'prescribe' the behavior of others in posting it here, then my original question still stands; what is the point of posting it here, in this discussion forum? 2. The fact that some lifestyle or career choice exposes that person to an increased risk of something bad does not mean that the choice in question is objectively unhealthy. It simply does not follow. If it did, almost every single lifestyle choice would be objectively unhealthy, starting with choosing a career as a doctor, nurse, or police officer. Almost every action we take puts us at increased risk of something; this is why isolated facts do not provide enough context to write off entire lifestyles.
  2. If there weren't time travelers at Led Zeppelin concerts when they were in their prime, then either time travel is impossible or those future people are letting their technology seriously go to waste
  3. I see, so you're ineptly trying to make the case that 'alternative lifestyles' such as homosexuality cannot be objective values because they slightly increase the risk of contracting harmful disease number 6. I say ineptly, because your quotations cites a grand total of two cases, and the article you linked documents a grand total of 74 cases discovered over a period of five years. In any case, if I were you, I'd focus on other lifestyles choices where the chances of contracting diseases due to the lifestyle is much higher. Here, I've even gone and found two for you: Becoming a doctor or nurse and becoming a police officer. You'd better get to work convincing the apologists for these lifestyles of their objective disvalue!
  4. Okay, let's take the tone down a notch on both sides. Drop the personal insinuations and just focus on the arguments.
  5. I've also seen the Cloudfare page once since David said he turned it off, although that's less frequent than before.
  6. Evaluating the character of an entire movement of people and ideas is quite an involved task, and involves drawing from many different people's accounts of events and evaluating the objectivity and trustworthiness of the people giving accounts. As such, I see no reason whatsoever to suppose that people who come to different conclusions than you are lying to themselves. It's not like the Objectivist movement is some physical object somewhere and we can just look at it to see whether it's dogmatic or not. Personally, I haven't seen any evidence of dogmatism in today's Objectivist movement that doesn't involve some action or statement by Peikoff, who (as I understand it) currently has almost no involvement in the activities of ARI. My personal interactions with people at ARI have been entirely devoid of any kind of dogmatism or intellectual bullying. When I contacted ARI about requesting their help in starting an Objectivist club at my university, I was incredibly surprised by how little he asked me about my knowledge of and experience with Objectivism. All that I was asked was whether or not I had read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. From some of the rumors I had heard circulating about ARI, I half expected him to ask me whether I thought Objectivism was a closed system or not; there was absolutely none of that. Also, most of the Objectivists I've talked to are right there with you on the worthlessness of the U.S.'s current wars, myself included.
  7. Not at all. There's no Objectivist principle that states that ARI as an organization has a healthy environment, or that Rand's personal opinions are gospel, or that Ron Paul is a negative force in the current fight for liberty, and certainly not one about asking others to evaluate oneself in some manner. I just don't get the heavy emphasis on the label. Knowing who you are, what you believe, and why you believe it is primary.
  8. I'll let you know if any errors occur while CloudFlare is disabled. None yet, but they happen infrequently for me.
  9. He's referring to a post of his that was deleted.
  10. Now why would an entity without the possibility of going out of existence have a "necessity" to "enhance existence"? (enhance along what standard? What is at the negative end of such a standard, if not death?)
  11. One of the major issues that led to the financial crisis was the fact that banks had very limited liability and responsibility, but increased 'freedom' that came from deregulation. In this case, deregulation basically meant: more freedom to play with other people's money and not face the consequences if that play went bad. Obviously, this is not the vision of the free market that Objectivism advocates. In a truly free market, deregulation is accompanied by a system where companies reap both the benefits and the hazards of excessive risk-taking. If I had to choose between a system where banks were not held responsible for most of the losses resulting from the risks they took, but they weren't allowed to take very many risks in the first place (because of regulation), and a system where banks were not held responsible for the losses of taking risks, and were relatively unrestricted in the actions they could take, I'd choose the regulation. Of course, neither of these is a truly free market, so they have nothing to say about Objectivism's ideal political system.
  12. I too look to Objectivism as the philosophy of the future, of human progess, of cultural and political advancement. I am very excited about the changing role that it will play in our culture and in the lives of individuals. However, this has nothing to do with the open/closed question. Also, this is all pretty off topic. But the things that you are talking about when you speak of "changing human nature" are not the fundamentals of human nature that the principles of Objectivism are abstracted from. Whether or not the people of the future can squat does not affect whether or not Objectivist moral principles apply to them. Objectivist principles are formed from fundamental aspects of human nature, like the fact that we are reasoning beings that can err, the fact that we survive fundamentally through production, etc. These things are not changing over time. Certainly, Objectivist principles will need to be applied to countless new situations as technology, law, and society change, but the principles themselves do not need to change; if they did, they would not be fundamental principles drawn from human nature, now would they?
  13. Welcome to the forum. Enjoy Atlas Shrugged
  14. It is certainly possible to write IP laws which are far too broad and stifle legitimate innovation simply because it's kind of similar to something that's patented. Simply because IP is valid doesn't mean that the laws protecting it can't be written poorly and thus have bad effects. Whether this is actually the case concerning current U.S. law, I have no idea.
  15. I think this is an interesting question, albeit off topic here, so I have brought it up in another thread, this one a current thread which is strictly on the topic of IP. Please carry on that aspect of the discussion over there, if you like.
  16. An issue that I thought was interesting came up in another thread, and although it's off-topic a bit there, it's quite on topic here, so I thought I'd call attention to it: Here, iamthatis is referencing Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism: "Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." - Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand, all property is privately owned under capitalism. However, after a certain time period patents expire, and the idea becomes part of the 'public domain.' Does this mean that the idea is no longer property? That it is property, but that it is publicly owned? Or unowned? How can her support for time limits on patents be reconciled with her view that all property should be privately owned under capitalism?
  17. I'll agree that he adopts positions on IP which, if enacted, would be an existential step away from capitalism rather than towards it. However, I certainly do not consider everyone who defends capitalism but attacks IP 'stupid' or 'irrational,' and don't see enough about this guy personally to decide that here. The arguments in defense of IP are complex and the philosophical grounding multilayered. Suffice it to say that he gets this aspect of capitalism wrong, and that the views he advocates would endanger the rights of producers if enacted.
  18. Quite an enjoyable poem. Thanks for posting it!
  19. I'm not sure about fundamentally anti-capitalist or anti-profit, but Objectivism maintains that intellectual property is a valid form of property, and therefore a truly capitalist system will provide for the protection of the creator's rights to it, in the same manner as it would for the creator of a physical object. In other words, patents and copyrights in Objectivism are justified, not by the benefit that they provide society, but precisely by natural right. However, that's tangential to this thread, and has been explored more thoroughly in other threads if you are interested in discussing it.
  20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bane_%28comics%29#Powers_and_abilities Sounds like a potentially great villain to me.
  21. Everything should be tax exempt In a world where taxation is the norm, however, I do not think that charities have more or less of a claim to be tax exempt than for-profit businesses. Here is a thread with links to other threads that address frequently asked questions such as this one (and others you have asked here). There are three separate threads about taxation. Also, the Lexicon entry is always a good starting point for basic questions; here is the Lexicon entry on taxation. Incidentally, in the first link I provided, there is also a link to a 36-page long Prudent Predator thread (why not steal if you can get away with it?) on the subject of your SS-collecting Grandma question, which you raised in the Self-interest thread.
  22. Apparently this subject has come up on the forums before.
  23. One interesting question is whether he is against copyrights altogether, or whether he simply thinks that using them for certain kinds of software is a misapplication of them (as indicated in iamthatis's post above), and why he thinks that. Questions of what kinds of objects deserve intellectual property rights can be much more complicated than simply the broad question of whether IP as a whole is valid or invalid.
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