Dante
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Posts posted by Dante
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Frankly, I think that this video, and her performance at the VMAs, are immature and rather pathetic. It's obvious to me that she's just desperately trying to shed her previous Disney channel, teenage idol persona. She's trying to announce to the world that she's 'all grown up' now and having sex, and it just makes it that much more obvious how immature the attempt is. It reminds me of a college freshman who hasn't been allowed to drink before, and thinks that binge drinking in college makes him 'an adult.' That's not how adults treat alcohol, and this isn't how adults treat sex.
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Sometimes, I think a better strategy is to support break-ups of these countries: let Iraq split into three countries, let Syria revert to the multiple states that existed under Turkish control.
I heard a rather strong version of this argument on The Daily Show a few days ago, that the main cause of violence in the region has been the arbitrary country borders drawn by Westerners after WWII. It's stuff we've all heard before, and I'd always thought that this argument was fairly common sense, but after thinking on it a little I'm not so sure. Do we really think that the sectarian violence between different religious and ethnic groups that has happened over there would have been much better if each group had its own country? Look at one case where country division by religious beliefs actually occurred: India and Pakistan. We'll never know what it would have looked like over there had they remained one country, but one thing we can say for sure: it hasn't exactly been peaceful between the two nations. I'm not convinced that giving each cultural group its own country and government wouldn't have just resulted in basically the same thing we have now: different ethnic and religious groups that hate each other engaging in conflict after conflict. Perhaps it would be the same violence, just categorized differently by us: as inter-country conflicts rather than sectarian violence within a country. Maybe allowing breakups of countries would help, but I'm really not sure by how much.
I think the reason that this argument has gained so much traction is not because it stands up to scrutiny particularly well, but rather that it furthers a favorite pastime of Western intellectuals: blaming Western ignorance for global problems.
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And right on queue, there's this article in the WaPo:
Charters and vouchers are a giant bait-and-switch. Once they kill off actual private schools, the "oversight" will kick in and we'll be left with the same situation we have now but with no private schools at all.
I understand your point, but that article wasn't talking about oversight of the curricula of charter schools, but rather financial oversight of their balance sheets in order to prevent fraud. This form of oversight is one that schools (and all other companies) should be subject to. Of course, in a free market, this oversight would be demanded by customers and investors rather than required by law, but the fact remains that this type of oversight is perfectly valid and necessary.
The second half of the article discusses disciplinary policies set by schools, which is more clearly something that should be left up to each school individually. However, nowhere does the author discuss oversight of the curricula of charter schools, which is what charter schools and school choice advocates should actually be afraid of.
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I can't think of a better example of Objectivists compromising away the future by supporting half-measures like this. Vouchers and charters will kill real private schools by making them effective wards of the state ("my house, my money, my rules"). You really think taxpayers are going to say, "here's a bunch of money, spend it on whatever you like"? No chance in hell.
The solution is private schools and charity as a transition--all with zero dollars from unwilling tax payers. Vouchers and charters reinforce public funding of schools like never before, making it such that even richer people expect government handouts to pay for their kid's private schools.
The Objective Standard, an Objectivist publication, made this exact argument in 2011; article here. They argue that education tax credits represent the true transition to more of a free market education, while school vouchers are simply a tool to eventually extend government control over the curricula of private as well as public schools.
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From Craig Biddle:
"IS LIBERTARIANISM AN EVIL DOCTRINE? Yes, if evil is the irrational and the destructive.....
This was written by Peter Schwartz, not Craig Biddle.
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Is forgetting subject to moral judgement? Was I being neglectful by not focusing and making sure that her laptop went back in her bag?
In my view, absolutely it is. It is important to take a wider context than simply one instance in order to address issues like this, where you are not consciously making a wrong choice, but rather your 'default' setting or level of attention leads you astray. (If this is really just an isolated incident, and you're usually very attentive to stuff like this, then the rest of my post isn't really relevant to your situation in particular. However, this is an issue that I've given some thought to, so either way I'd like to lay it out.)
I'll give you some examples from my life to make this a little more concrete. I have a tendency to fail to look for opportunities to show those that I care about just how valuable they are to me. Far too often, when other people tell me about something they did for a friend or loved one, I find myself chiding myself for not thinking of that, or for not doing something similar when I had the chance. For example, it just didn't occur to me to call my sister after her first day or few days of college, to see how it was going. I haven't seen my grandparents in quite a while, and I didn't even think that it might be a good idea to visit them until my sister mentioned that she was flying out there to see them. For a more mundane example, I'm sure you know those people that, when they go shopping, are constantly finding gifts to buy that their friends or family would appreciate. I'm kind of the opposite. I could be looking at something that would be perfect as a gift for someone I care about, and I probably wouldn't even realize it; it wouldn't even occur to me to buy it for them.
I'll stop embarrassing myself with examples of my failings, but my point is this: even though none of these are bad choices that I consciously made, the end result is that, if I follow my 'default' setting with things like this, I end up neglecting people that I care about and whom I definitely don't want to neglect. In my case, I need to find ways to consciously and actively seek out these opportunities, because they don't just 'occur' to me like they often do with others around me. I may not mean to miss out on these opportunities, but the fact is that I do, and I really don't want to. The solution is for me to take responsibility for what my 'default' setting is, and find ways to counteract it and eventually shift it more towards were I would like it to be.
Presumably in the future you want to avoid forgetful mistakes that inconvenience your mother (or others around you). Actually achieving that goal requires not hiding behind the explanation of 'well, I didn't mean to' and taking a longer viewpoint, where you are able to change how forgetful you are, to some extent at least. But again, if you're generally much better about this sort of thing, I don't mean to offend.
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Robert Tracinski, an Objectivist political columnist over at RealClearPolitics, has just written a defense of intervention in Syria. Personally, I think we should not intervene, but I respect Tracinski's views, and I think he makes a strong case for intervention (one that would be of interest to this thread). The link to his article is above, key excerpt here:
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The only answer to this dilemma is to recognize that this is a war with two enemies. Our choice isn't which one we should oppose. Our only choice is which enemy we should oppose first. If we allow the Assad regime to remain, it should only be so that we can take them out later. And if we back the rebels, it should only be on the proviso that we prepare for a second stage in the Syrian civil war, in which we support secular opponents in a battle against Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
The question, then, is which of these strategies is more likely to lead to a result we like. I would argue that we're better off toppling Assad first. If Assad were able to suppress the al-Qaeda wing of the insurgency, he would be able to suppress the entire insurgency. The moment would be over, and we would have to give up on removing his regime. So there's no such thing as backing Assad now only to turn against him later. But if we take down Assad now, we have reason to expect that we might then be able to support better elements against the Islamists in the nine-way free-for-all that is likely follow. Even the al-Qaeda-allied factions in Syria are falling out with each other, and al-Qaeda always has a tendency to lose friends and alienate people wherever it goes, because they always replace a vicious dictatorship with an even more vicious dictatorship. Plus, toppling Assad has direct benefits outside of Syria. It would be a crushing blow to Hezbollah, which would help our friends in both Israel and Lebanon. And it would deal a big loss to the Iranian regime, reducing its power and possibly undermining its stability at home, where it is widely and deeply hated by its own people.
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The desegregation case seems to be simply the legal pretense for trying to prevent this from happening. I think the main reason the suit is being brought is that the teachers' unions (significant supporters of President Obama and Democrats in general) oppose the program.
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So you are saying that Ayn Rand took capitalism as a self-evident primary and then proceeded to derive Ethics etc. accordingly?
Reading comprehension's not so good, huh? The Industrial Revolution is an illustration of the productive power of man's mind under a relatively free system, not a proof. Rand's derivation of her ethical system is clearly spelled out in her work; the fact that she was inspired by historical examples does not eliminate the derivation that she put down in writing for her ethics.
The inspiration for Einstein's theory of relativity was his imagination of what it would be like to ride on the crest of a light wave. By your logic, that must have been all the support his theory had.
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In Ayn Rand's works it is de rigueur that Capitalism (here defined as a political system whose primary purpose the protection of individual rights) necessarily leads to two things. First, it will lead greater aggregate prosperity e.g. increased national output, technological progress, etc. Second, that it will be universally positive for all (or even most) honest participants, and that people will necessarily have upward mobility, etc.
My question is, has anybody ever formally proven the above, basing the proof on first principles?
Remember that all we know about Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics and (abstract) Politics can be perfectly true without the above being proven, or even being proven false. In other words, if Capitalism made us poorer, or screwed over a small number of honest individuals through no fault of their own, then that still wouldn't matter: Capitalism would still, logically, be the only moral system.
Ayn Rand purposefully did not cover this in her works, wherein she stopped at defining the proper system, not analyzing its aggregate effects (even though she clearly made reference a lot to the presumed conclusions of said analysis).
Has somebody else taken on this task?
Quite simply, because this isn't a "proof from first principles" kind of question. This can only be answered by the empirical record of relatively free economies versus that of controlled economies. Rand herself said that it would have been nearly impossible to come to the conclusions that she did prior to the industrial revolution; i.e. prior to the first major empirical demonstration of the productive power of the human mind in a (relatively) free context. This is a historical and empirical question, and the case for capitalism's ability to generate prosperity has been aptly made by many different economists and historians (and not simply Objectivists).
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The reason I don't want to send my real resume is that I'm afriad they'll be biased against a non-local candidate. Why call me back when they can get someone who doesn't have to relocate?
Well it should be obvious to them that you're thinking about relocating anyways; otherwise, you wouldn't be sending your resume to them. I really don't see any reason not to send your actual resume. You might very well get a job prospect, or at least some kind of connection, out of it, and you don't want that to be based on falsehoods.
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The irony, of course, is that by suggesting that you have not only accepted a politics, but you have accepted the politics of thugs. "Testing against reality" involves the subjugation of millions of unwitting men to your theory, and the destruction of their lives every time that theory fails. You of course never bothered naming your politics, that would be too honest. You just accept it without ever talking or thinking about it, like a brain dead zombie.
This is not how economic theories are tested. The field of econometrics exists because economists have to test their models against purely historical data, without the conditions that would be present in an actual experiment.
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Along with Mankiw, I would recommend Krugman (http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Paul-Krugman/dp/1429251638/) - even if your politics is in disagreement with his, his is the best book to learn about IS-LM analysis (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/is-lmentary/)which is a Keynesian theory. Any textbook which does not cover Keynesianism does not deserve to be called a textbook.
Let's be clear that you're talking about undergraduate textbooks here, not graduate books. Keynesianism (and monetarism) are useful for giving undergraduates a working knowledge of a few big-picture economic questions, and helping them to understand political debates over economic questions. However, graduate macro textbooks generally do not teach Keynesian economics. Some Keynesian insights, such as sticky prices, are introduced as possible modeling choices, but none of the economics that Keynes actually did is really relevant anymore in terms of training future economists.
As to undergraduate economics textbooks, I taught a macro course recently, and decided not to use Mankiw's book mainly because I thought it was too dry. I went with Baumol and Blinder's Macroeconomics instead, which is a very good book that does a good job of bringing in recent U.S. experiences and tying economic questions to the political debates of the day.
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Robert Tracinski, an advocate of Rand's ideas and a contributor at RealClearPolitics, has become one of the writers associated with libertarian populism, and has commented on it several times in his running column "The Daily Debate." See, for example, his comments about Paul Krugman's dismissal of libertarian populism.
Personally, I tend to agree with Tracinski that libertarian populism represents an important facet in the case for liberty. In particular, the fact that 'populism' is commonly associated with redistributionism points to one of the key messages of libertarian populism: that government handouts are not the only thing that a populist political movement could ever offer to the poor. Another type of populism is possible, one that advocates capitalism as the ideal political system for everyone, not just for wealthy business owners.
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I'm 30, my stepdaughter from my ex-marriage is 12, and I've been in her life for 11 years. She doesn't know her real father and considers me her dad. I divorced her mother a year ago, but I've stayed close to my stepdaughter, Skyping with her most days and seeing her usually at least a couple times a week. The divorce devastated her and I feel like sh*t about it, so I stayed on as her dad for HER sake to help get her through it. But for my own sake, I think I would benefit from breaking ties with my former family at this point. I don't want to deal with my ex at all, both her and I will date other people, and my stepdaughter will soon hit adolescence and put me through everything that that implies. It was fun when she was little, but I'm uncomfortable about the idea of being a parent to a teenage girl. Would it be evil of me to abandon her when I'm the only father figure she's ever known?
I think you should seriously think about what this relationship brings in to your life, because I'm willing to bet that it brings a lot more value than simply avoiding the guilt of abandoning her. I don't have children, and I understand that having a kid is incredibly demanding, but I also understand that it is incredibly rewarding. At least, that's what I anticipate for myself when I do have them. I'm willing to bet that if you choose to abandon her to avoid occasional contact with your ex and some adolescent temper tantrums, you will come to deeply regret that decision.
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It's funny, I'm sure environmentalists love Obama's announcement of increased regulation and ultimate phasing out of coal (for example, Al Gore loves it). These same environmentalists have been trying non-stop to halt all hydraulic fracturing (fracking), but cheap natural gas from fracking is the only reason we can even consider cracking down further on coal.
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This turned into a longish rant. Take note that when I say "you," I am not really referring to Kevin or anyone in particular; it's a generic "you."
Don't misunderstand, by no means am I saying you ought to be a jerk. It's good to be a courteous human being. That applies in most all situations, and applies when you're spending time with someone you are, or may be, attracted to.
But to insist on opening the door for a woman because she is a woman and you're playing some role, or insist on picking where you sit at in a restaurant, or to insist on driving, or to insist on opening the car door ... or any other other special action that you would take on a "date" that you would not do for someone you are not on a date with (or aren't attracted to, like a guy if you're a guy and hetero), is not courteous. It's presumptive and rude, and built solely on subjective (and faulty for various reasons) social conventions. That's not to say all social conventions are bad. But some are.
These dating social conventions are bad, for the reasons I gave: They are presumptuous; they are implicitly sexist (not that all things some people label as "sexist" are actually sexist or bad, but we can talk about that later in more depth if you want); they treat women as a special case. Those misplaced conventions either cause you to relate to her as though she is a less-than-capable human being who shouldn't have a say in where she sits in the restaurant (unless she absolutely insists) because you're "the man," or they cause you to relate to her as though she is some treasure to be placed above yourself, therefore lowering your own self-value in relation to her; by doing that you make yourself out to be a very unattractive and needy person in a pitiful way.
Let's not go too far here. Kevin's advice is bad for most of the reasons given in this thread and others, but absolutely there are special actions that you should take on a date that you wouldn't take for one of your guy friends or just some random stranger. You treat your date as special because he or she is special, to you. She isn't special because she's a woman, she's special for all the reasons that led you to ask her out. Now how you express that is more open; you could go along with social conventions like holding the door and paying for her meal (assuming you set up the date), or not. If she finds those sexist, that's fine, the point isn't to follow some rulebook, but just to communicate that she is special to you, not because she's a woman but just because you like who she is. Treat your date like a 'special case' because she is. That means going beyond just courtesy stuff that you'd do for a stranger, because she means more to you than a stranger does. I'm speaking from the male perspective, but this goes for both sides of the date.
Now, some of the stuff recommended above can be used to convey to your date that she's special, and others I just don't see. Picking the table, for instance, seems like a pure dominance move. In the broader sense, taking the time and the initiative to plan out a date and set it up beforehand is a nice thing to do for your date (man or woman), but picking the table first? I just don't see that, or the "no touching in public" thing. Wow. Now, not ignoring your date during the meal, having a two-sided conversation, and opening the door for her (if she doesn't mind that) all seem like sound advice; not because of some leading man framework, but because of both common courtesy and the fact that you should go beyond common courtesy on a date.
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My girlfriend and I saw the movie in theaters and then she bought his album Cold Fact. The music is quite good, and the story of the documentary is fascinating. I didn't think it had too much of a slant; it certainly shows the gratifying elements of fame and success with his arrival in SA and the reception he gets there. I quite enjoyed the movie.
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Lord. Okay. Smoking is something we can foolishly become addicted to. Not smart, but probably millions of people have gone there. It's not anti-life or crap like that. It's a stupid act that can be hard to kick. You're hurting yourself.
Uhh.. you understand that hurting yourself is what Rand meant by anti-life, right? Anti-life doesn't mean you're killing yourself instantly, it means that whatever you're doing is working against your own life... aka hurting yourself... like smoking.
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But I doubt you can. I think even the most moderate Islamic scholars simply advocate for Islam getting out of the way, and not imposing its values on everyone. I have never heard a single Islamic scholar (or, for that matter, any mainstream Christian scholar) argue FOR reason (and all that entails, including the abortion of accidental, unwanted pregnancies, extramarital sex, homosexual sex if you're a homosexual, etc., etc.), or for freedom (including the freedom to insult any religion, to leave any religion, to engage in homosexual activity, to have an abortion, etc, etc.).
There is a big difference, that you seem to be glossing over, between arguing for reason and arguing for reason and everything Objectivists think reason entails, and the latter is a ridiculous requirement. To illustrate why, let me simply continue your list of what we both agree reason entails: free market capitalism, ethical egoism, and atheism. You're never going to find a religious scholar that agrees with Objectivists about what reason entails, for obvious reasons: then they wouldn't be religious in the first place. I'm talking about Islamic scholars who affirm the fundamental importance of reason and embrace the basics of Western society: religious freedom, gender equality, freedom of speech, rule of law. That said, finding one example took me about 30 seconds on Google: Fathi Osman Sample quote: '“We have to realize that God’s law is not an alternative to the human mind, nor is it supposed to put it out of action,” Dr. Osman wrote in an essay on Islam and human rights. “Openness is life, while being closed off and isolated is suicidal.”'
The only way reason and freedom will prevail in Islamic countries is the same way it prevailed in the West: through secularism. Not through looking for support in religious text.
And why do you think secularism was able to prevail in what were still majority Christian countries? Precisely because Christians themselves came to accept the compatibility of Christianity with a secular society. This occurred partly because scholars, like Thomas Aquinas, reinterpreted the religious texts as compatible with reason and secular society. It bears noting here that a similar move towards reason and secularism occurred in Islam's history, through thinkers like Avicenna. Unfortunately, these thinkers did not ultimately exert the kind of lasting influence on Islam that similar Christian theologians did on Christianity. Thus, the theocratic nature of Islam throughout much of the world.
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The recent Economist has a graphic on a survey of Muslim opinion. Note the answer to the question of whether people who leave Islam should get the death penalty. In Egypt, a huge majority supports killing apostates. meanwhile, Even in Tunisia, most liberal of the Maghreb countries, almost 30% of respondents say it is okay to kill Muslims who give up Islam. The most liberal areas -- by this poll -- are the ex-Soviet republics.
Thanks for the link. I'd be interested to see the numbers for Muslims in America too. For this link, it's worth noting that the percentages being charted are percentages out of only those Muslims that support Sharia law in the first place. This causes big problems with the way they've drawn their graph. For example, although Iraq and Lebanon look similar in the numbers of how many people support killing apostates (42% and 46%), they aren't. In Iraq, 91% of respondents support the basic premise of imposing sharia law, so the percentage given for killing apostates just about represents all Muslims (42% of 91% yielding 38% overall). In Lebanon, only 29% of Muslims even agree with the imposition of sharia law in the first place, so the number that support killing apostates is 46% of 29%, or 13% overall.
Either way, clearly the majority of Muslims in many parts of the world do not agree with even basic requirements of Western values such as religious freedom. Islam in these regions is still stuck in its own Dark Ages.
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Yes, really. If you subject the two sets of values to a rigidly rational evaluation, the conclusion is that Islamic and western values are not compatible.
And? Islam is not compatible with itself! Its holy book contradicts itself numerous times, much like the Bible. In virtue of this, I fail to see why Islamic scholars who accept western values are being more contradictory than your extremists. They are all picking and choosing verses they like, interpreting away those they don't, in order to glean a consistent worldview out of contradictory source material. I see no reason to accept the idea that one set of them is 'more serious' about ideas or about their own religion than the other. And that's certainly not why we would label one group 'extremist.'
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Because people who take things seriously are called extremists. That's just how that word is used.
So Muslim scholars that devote their lives to arguing for the compatibility of Islam with Western values aren't taking their religion seriously? Really?
'Extremist' Muslims aren't labeled extremist because they're the only ones that take their religion seriously. They're labeled extremist because they're willing to kill for their interpretation of Islam.
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Argh. Reading this back to myself, I don't think I'm being very clear to express what I regard here as a potential double standard, but... oughtn't we be consistent... in advocating consistency? If it's just a matter of hitting the right definition of "property," with independent inventors being otherwise "screwed" if you're right, and novelists being "screwed" if I'm right (or that they both must come to view the system as being somehow in their own ultimate best interest, and adapt to the marketplace it creates, regardless of which definition we finally accept), then let's agree to find that definition. If, however, it is very clear to you that the novelist has property beyond the physical copy of the books he writes, then it is very clear to me that the independent inventor has the right to the fruits of his effort regardless of losing the race to the patent office. So what now?
Well I think part of what makes the example of the novel so compelling is that the amount of specificity in the product is very high. So much so that there's practically no chance of an "independent writer" who hasn't already read some published novel replicating the exact same novel with enough detail to infringe on the copyright. Perhaps most of the conflicts between independent inventors vs novelists being 'screwed' would be resolved by having very high requirements for the specificity of some patent or copyright. Certainly our current system, where Apple can sue Samsung for making products that 'look' too much like their own, has much too generous an interpretation of intellectual property. Being able to patent a highly specific formula for a new complex chemical compound seems highly unlikely to conflict with an independent inventor's product; being able to patent the shape of a curve at the corner of a smartphone almost certainly will. Certainly we still need some procedure for dealing with the very few independent inventors in such a system, but by and large this issue would not arise.
Modern Art or Toddler Art?
in Visual Arts
Posted
I'm guessing that if you put a segment from a piece of literature up against a short story written by a first grader, most people could tell the difference there. That would seem a more apt comparison to this exercise.