necrovore

It's an individual responsibility, not a collective one. You can't (blindly) trust other people to make the determination for you, and you should not expect to.

The responsibility for establishing the truth of claims falls not on the podcaster but on the listener. Each person has to decide for himself what to believe.

The way I look at it, sex is metaphysically given, but gender is man-made. This is much the same as how the fact of someone's birth is metaphysically given, but the record of their birth is man-made. It is theoretically possible for actual events to be different from recorded events, or for sex to be different from gender. But there is a principle that consists of trying to keep them the same. That principle is called "honesty"...

Trump is not asking regular Americans to sacrifice their due process rights. He's aiming for certain specific people. However, the Left is telling regular Americans that they have to sacrifice their right to be safe from MS-13 gang members on the altar of "due process." Or that Americans have no such right to be safe. (I sort of suspect that the amount of "process" that is "due" is whatever amount is necessary to ensure that the Left wins.) This Garcia guy is no stranger to the legal system, so he is not exactly an innocent person in all this. Just like George Floyd wasn't exactly innocent and contributed a great deal to his own death. We aren't sacrificing these people to ourselves, because we aren't gaining anything. We only seek to keep what we already have. "A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me. I gain nothing from killing a holdup man."

No, what would make you a fake is if you (a) pretended your body was other than it was, and (b) insisted that everybody else pretend too.

It's strange that this is the first we're hearing about "authoritarian takeover attempts." Apparently the lockdowns, the sorting of businesses into "essential" and "non-essential," the control of social media to stop "misinformation," de-banking, parents being arrested for complaining about curricula at school board meetings, none of that qualifies as authoritarianism. It's only when Trump does something that it's authoritarianism. Double standards. Trump apparently has lots of precedents he can cite. I wonder who set those precedents?

Trade deficits are a symptom, but not the disease. The cause of trade deficits is money-printing: if we were on a gold standard, long-term trade deficits would be unsustainable, because we would run out of gold. So we'd have to earn it back by selling our own products and services, and that would balance it out. Some people think trade deficits are "great for America" but that's effectively saying that money-printing is "great for America." That's not true: the "hollowing out" of America, the apparent inability to produce anything of value anymore, is because of money-printing. People who benefit from money-printing don't need to be productive, whereas people who try to get paid by being productive see the rewards for their efforts decreasing year after year. Of course the people who are howling the loudest about losing "free trade" lately are the ones who benefit the most from free printed money (and spending it abroad). On the other hand, the ones who are crowing about "sticking it to the rich" are doing so because they see that, more and more often, people get rich through pull instead of by work. (And that's how you know your civilization is doomed.) Few people get rich by being productive anymore. We are well past the point where money-printing, or being favored by the money-printers, pays better than actual productivity. Tariffs are still the wrong solution, because they punish honest trade, too. Tariffs don't do anything about the real problem, which means it will continue. Congress will never cut spending, and the printing press will keep printing.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5221999-trump-on-if-auto-companies-raise-costs-due-to-tariffs-i-couldnt-care-less/

The only reason they're trying to undermine Rand and Peikoff is so that they can undermine the principles, as a form of ad hominem attack.

Anti-objectivists are full of triumphant little fairy tales like this: "... and this, boys and girls, is why you shouldn't try to have any principles." But they don't have anything better to offer, and they know it. (In related news, I heard that Elon Musk blew up a rocket once, which proves that all of rocket science is pretentious and useless.)

The idea of separating state and economics is not widely known at present, much less widely held. I suppose it is possible to be a successful entrepreneur without ever coming across the idea. It is also very easy for the government to distort the economy in various ways and then for an entrepreneur to figure out a legal way to make money off the distortion. That may be what Elon Musk has done. He did not create the distortion in the first place. (However, he might find himself wanting to maintain it.) If the US cannot beat China, the problem is probably self-sacrificial regulations, and the proper solution is to get rid of them. Tariffs will not improve the situation; they will only force people to pay the full price of the regulations even if they order from foreign countries that don't have them. One can only hope that tariffs make the case for deregulation more urgent.

Any nation or system that is based on respect for individual rights can also be undermined, if it is flooded with people who do not respect them.

Yeah, I'm running a massive trade deficit with my grocery store, because I keep buying lots of stuff from them, but they don't buy anything from me. Some people are arguing that we should outsource low-paying jobs like manufacturing to other countries while we concentrate on high-paying jobs like finance. Besides the sense of "we don't want to get our hands dirty by working with actual stuff, we want to work in nice office jobs," the problem they're overlooking is that money-printing is distorting the economy making certain jobs (such as finance) pay artificially high while others (such as manufacturing) pay artificially low. The solution to this problem is not tariffs, though; it's to stop printing money. If Trump is serious about tariffs replacing the income tax, he should see if he can get Congress to allow people to take tax credits for tariff payments.

How do you recognize a "pseudo-fact"? It seems it is you who only accepts facts that have been curated by your esteemed group of experts, and you only apply Objectivist principles to those specific facts when drawing your conclusions. Further, when your experts tell you to reject certain other facts, when they say, "don't look in the closet," you obediently don't look. And when they throw people in jail for stating those inconvenient facts (as tweets for example), or when they cancel elections which may have been influenced by those facts, you seem to just shrug your shoulders. No complaints, no condemnation. After all, they're the experts, and so they apparently have the right to throw those people in jail for "spreading misinformation," and to cancel elections, if the voting public "gets it wrong." It seems you would say that your experts are the only ones who can see reality for what it really is. Suppose your experts were lying to you. Do you even realize that's possible? If you listen only to them, how could you tell if they were? You do realize that their "facts" can be self-consistent and still wrong, right? What then is the definition of a lie? Is it determined by reality itself, or by your specific group of experts, through whose lens everything must be seen?

We do call for understanding them; this is for example why Leonard Peikoff wrote The Ominous Parallels, which seeks to understand Nazi Germany.