necrovore

No, that's not how it works. No one can think or see for another person, just as no one can breathe or eat for another person. It would be second-handed for me to try to see only what other people see, or to try to know only what other people know. If I cannot trust my own mind, or memory, or eyes, then reason is impossible to me. That would also apply to anyone else. (This would also mean that I am more likely to trust people who encourage me to see things and think them out for myself, than people who tell me that I should trust "Western leaders" but not my own memory.) There's sometimes a difference between what you know and what you can "prove in court," and I suppose this is an example of it, or an explanation for it. It's also an example of why freedom is necessary -- because as long as I'm not hurting anybody else, I shouldn't need to "prove everything in court." The reason freedom is a value to a rational being is that it means, for example, that I can go off and do things that no one else can see the reason for. There is the risk that I am wrong, but, I am not trying to force anyone else to go along with me. As long as that's the case, the "blast radius" of my mistakes is limited, by the freedom of other people. The ephemeral nature of the Internet is a bit of a problem with the Internet, but not so much with reality. If reality consisted only of non-repeating events, then abstraction would be impossible. Therefore, if an abstraction is correct, new pieces of evidence for it will keep coming up. Besides, other people are seeing the same things on the Internet that I am. Maybe you need to diversify your news sources, in which case you will see some of these facts as well, because they will come up again, even if I don't have specific citations. Even if you disagree with "opposition" news sources, sometimes they mix facts and opinions, and the facts are correct even if the opinions are wrong, and so you can discard the opinions. The facts are sometimes verifiable and important. Sometimes even the Marxists get facts right (but they always propose Marxism as the solution to every problem they see... because they are Marxists.) Nobody has time to read every article from every source but even a little random sampling may reveal important things and, if that happens, you can investigate more thoroughly. I do take my own advice and look at "opposition" news sources from time to time. So far I haven't seen anything that would change my mind, at least about the broad abstractions. Instead I see people telling me to ignore facts and not to trust my own memory.

There's evidence that I've seen but don't have. I can't present it to you because I don't have it anymore, but there are sources that keep producing more, and it's consistent with information going back decades. I have a long memory. I actually get frustrated with news websites that present useful information (often with quotes, pictures, etc.) only for it to "scroll off the screen" in a day or two. Like the time when Nancy Pelosi claimed that her house was vandalized, there was a picture of something spray-painted on her garage door, but looking at the picture you could see that the spray-paint mysteriously stopped at the exact edge of the door and did not intrude onto the brick next to the door, where it would have been much harder to clean off. It was as if someone used a board or something to protect the brick from the spray-paint. Why would real vandals be so kind? Unfortunately I doubt if I could find that article or that picture today. It's not like Google would be of any use, because of their own political leanings. Sometimes I "print to PDF" but often I don't, there is just too much. Occasionally these sources remind me of something they said six months ago, and I'm like, hey, I remember that! That wouldn't mean anything to somebody who didn't see it the first time, though. I think a lot of the people here who agree with me know what I am talking about, though. By contrast, certain people in power would like to suppress information that is inconvenient to them. They create "disinformation boards" and such to do it officially, too. That's a good reason not to trust them. As I've indicated before, I don't trust that general approach to knowledge. I trust reality, and the approach of starting with reality, and following it wherever it leads -- not ignoring it or suppressing it, either because it's inconvenient or for any other reason. Reality still exists even if you do ignore it, and ultimately it can't be suppressed. There is more than one Western philosophy and some value reality and some don't. (Also, there are degrees of valuing reality, and there are some philosophies that value it different amounts in different contexts.) In that sense, we might want to choose carefully which Western values are worth defending. I would generally side with Ayn Rand.

So I should just trust them, eh? ... That's your idea of "consistently holding Western values"? Just stop trying to figure things out for yourself, stop believing your lying eyes, and trust the people in power. Right. Talk about a "villain's line of thinking from Atlas Shrugged"... (or maybe The Fountainhead?)

I'll say it again: you're conflating Western values with Western leaders. They are opposites.

I never made an anti-capitalist argument. My argument was that US funding of NATO was subsidizing European socialism, because the governments there didn't have to spend money on their own defense, and were free to spend it on social programs instead. "Fundamentally standing against your values" is not an initiation of force. Putin attacked Ukraine, sure, but he did not attack NATO or the US. NATO is technically not obliged to defend Ukraine, as it is not self-defense for NATO to do so. Ukraine isn't part of NATO yet. However, the "political class," who stand against proper values as much as Putin does, thought it would be a good idea to intervene. I have my doubts. (When you say "the West," do you mean the rulers, or the people? They are opposites. Or perhaps you mean Western ideals such as "freedom"? Freedom is not valued by the current rulers of the West.) Ayn Rand wrote that a free country has the right, but not the obligation, to destroy a non-free country at any time, because the non-free government consists of criminals. Setting aside the issue that Western countries are arguably not free at this time, there is also the issue that, even though a free country will eventually grow richer and stronger than a non-free one, it may not be richer or stronger at a particular time, and may wish to avoid conflict at that time. Even if Europe discovered the value of freedom tomorrow -- which would be great -- it is still in terrible shape because of the damage done by decades of bad policies. It is in no shape to go to war. But its leaders want war. They think they can keep everything under control, and they don't care if the people suffer. They probably think suffering people are easier to rule.

The political class is not capitalist. Just because someone has money doesn't mean they're capitalist. It is even possible for someone to earn money legitimately and still not be capitalist. They can be corrupted later, or as they go. (If they are not corrupted, I would not call them members of the political class. There is no "capitalist class.") The political class are criminals, like gangsters or bank robbers. They have the same psychology. They don't earn money by producing anything; they get it either by favors or by taxation or by just printing it. They regard productivity itself as a plum to be handed out, or a favor to be fought over; although they are willing to compete against each other, they do not want random people being productive and inventing new successful businesses in their garages (unless they can seize them, or buy them with printed money). They would rather have a few big businesses than thousands of little ones. (One of them said "I don't think we want people starting banks in their garages.") They want businesses to be awarded to people. They want to control who succeeds and who fails, so that they can ensure that they keep the successes among themselves and their friends. They do not want capitalism or freedom for anyone else ("You will own nothing and be happy"), just themselves, and maybe not really even that. They are trying to create the "state of ultimate inversion" that Ayn Rand warned about, where the people have to act by permission, but the government can do anything it pleases. That is fascism. Some of them claim to be supporters of Ayn Rand or freedom or capitalism but they are not selfish in the Ayn Rand sense. They have victims and (metaphorically speaking) they hide the bodies under layers and layers of bureaucracy. The political class likes to provoke crises and emergencies ("never let a crisis go to waste") because it gives them an excuse to seize political power and do end runs around mechanisms (such as due process) that are intended to protect individual rights, because, hey, it's an emergency! Even if they didn't originally provoke the war in Ukraine, they are acting to prolong it, because it is useful to them. The political class seeks to eradicate the rights of the West's citizens. They seek to have all the wealth for themselves. They would rather destroy wealth than not possess it, so Ayn Rand's observations that the mind is the root of wealth and that the mind only functions when free, are irrelevant to the political class. The never-ending "emergencies" are just one way for them to proceed. (Sensing that time is running out, they are trying to speed up the process.) The Covid lockdowns were the first large-scale example, but that didn't work. They've decided it's in their best interests to keep provoking Putin and to deliberately get rid of any possibility of a diplomatic solution. (Blinken was recently caught saying that the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines was a good thing...) This does not make Putin a good guy and I don't much care what happens to Putin in all this. What I do care about is the people of the West who are losing their rights (and, secondarily, their wealth) because of the self-appointed elites in charge of the bureaucracies of Western governments. (Douglas Adams was right when he said that the purpose of the President was not to wield power, but to attract attention away from it...) As far as I can tell the populist leaders who keep getting elected, like the Prime Minister of Italy, or Donald Trump, are derided because they are obstacles to the ongoing quest of the political class. Such populist politicians, if elected, are not always effective because all they (and almost all the people who voted for them) have is a sense of life and not an integrated philosophy. This can cause them to make stupid anti-freedom mistakes such as trying to ban "woke" books and the like. However, they are not integrated fascists; the political class are. And of course, as Ayn Rand herself observed, the mistakes of the defenders of capitalism make it easy to pick holes in their philosophical positions, and the holes, unfortunately, are very real. On the other hand, the political class has much bigger holes in their theories, and they are doomed to fail eventually. If they keep printing money, the currency will collapse. If they keep pursuing shortsighted environmentalist policies, they will destroy their own ability to produce energy (or win wars). If they keep pushing Putin, eventually Putin will be forced to react violently. The important questions are only how many victims the political class will take with them -- and what, if anything, will arise to take their place.

It's sounds like you're trying to argue that money is such a good thing that we wouldn't want to sully it by pointing out that it also motivates bank robbers (even though it does). Ayn Rand wrote a great deal about money, including how it makes a big difference whether it was obtained honestly or dishonestly. In fact, those are some of her most famous quotes.

Capitalism requires a separation of state and economics. What we have with NATO is not capitalism at all; it's cronyism and corruption. There's plenty of evidence for it.

"I can't argue that Newton's Laws are not true because they are just generalizations that Newton made up..." (My point being that what you are saying could be applied to any argument whatever and therefore is a rejection of reasoning as such)

I didn't say "just." Why "nevermind"? A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom (capitalism) and controls (e.g., socialism or fascism), so this does not rule out what I said. If two countries agree that each one will defend the other if attacked, then there is no need for money to change hands, even if the attack actually occurs. It might cost money to honor the agreement, but that money would not need to flow from either country to the other. Maybe after World War II, Europe was too weak to defend itself, and it might have made sense for the US to help it then, but the flow of money continued long after it should have ended, and then it took on a life of its own. What they don't need is free money or loot. They think they can have both, but they are neglecting the former in their pursuit of the latter. On what basis? You're accusing me of saying a lot of things that I didn't even say. Also, whether something is a "narrative" or not is beside the point: what matters is whether or not it's true. I don't think you can argue that it isn't true. Maybe you could argue that it isn't important, or that it leaves important things out, but I think it's important.

I suppose I'm concerned that NATO wouldn't want the war to be settled, because the political class has more money and power when the weapons are flowing than when they are not... and, like bank robbers, they are not good at thinking long-term, or assessing unexpected consequences.

I would argue with this: Although NATO did have the stated purpose of defending Europe from the Soviet Union, it had another purpose. The US paid almost the entire cost of NATO. This meant that the European countries did not have to spend very much money on their own defense at all. This meant that they were free to spend the money on social programs instead. Therefore, NATO had the effect of subsidizing European socialism with US tax dollars. This allowed the Democrats to point to Europe as an example of "successful" socialism, so that they could advocate for it in the United States (even though it costs too much in the US because there is no one to subsidize the US's defense). It also gave socialists in Europe more power than they would have otherwise had. This is the main reason why NATO had to continue to exist even after the fall of the Soviet Union, and why Russia was not allowed to join. Countries such as Germany have welcomed the opportunity to donate their old weapons systems to the cause in Ukraine and get free modern replacement systems from the US through NATO. The Nordic countries didn't have to join NATO at first, because they were able to finance their socialism by selling fossil fuels, but now that those fuels are politically unpopular (because of environmentalism) they are eager to sign up for the free NATO loot. Donald Trump earned enmity from the political class by insisting that several of these beneficiary countries bear more of the cost of their own defenses. Of course that would have helped to reveal the true price of socialism, and it would have disempowered the political class. There is also the likelihood that Biden has personally been getting aid money from the US, intended for Ukraine, diverted to himself or to his favorite political causes. Hunter Biden served on the board of a gas company there and made a lot of money even though the only possible use he would have been to them is political. Trump got in trouble for merely asking for this to be investigated. Biden on the other hand actually got a Ukranian official fired for investigating it, and bragged about that firing later. These facts tend to undercut Journo's argument even if his argument's moral judgment of Putin is completely correct. It's bad guys versus bad guys.

The red flags are more than just "mistakes." I was addressing the idea that "there is no possible reason the FBI would have raided Mar-a-Lago, especially knowing it would have rallied Trump's supporters, unless they knew they were going to find something incriminating Trump," because there are other reasons they could have raided. If anyone did cheat at the election, they would want to make the former look like the latter.

Harry Binswanger's article is wrong in a few ways. There were a lot of red flags around the 2020 election, which I've already discussed on this site. There is no proof that the election was honest or fraudulent... but it looks fishy, and nothing has come up to make it look any more honest. So Trump's objections (and those of his supporters) did not proceed merely from his feelings. It seems like Binswanger is trying to use the the feelings themselves to draw attention away from the evidence that justifies those feelings. Two reasons why the FBI may have proceeded with the raid at Mar-a-Lago, even if they knew it would cause Trump's sympathizers to rally around him, would be: (1) Trump had exculpatory evidence about himself and the FBI wanted to deprive him of it, and (2) Trump had evidence of FBI misconduct, and the FBI wanted to deprive him of it. This is why it's good that Trump's request for a special master was granted, although I don't think the special master is looking specifically for that kind of information. It is possible that some of that sort of information is also protected by executive privilege or somesuch, but I don't know if that's the case (or even if such evidence exists). In some ways these are details rather than big-picture items, but I have read many stories of police seizing exculpatory evidence and then telling courts it doesn't exist, leaving defendants to be convicted of crimes they didn't commit. On rare occasions the police are caught doing this, which is why there are stories to read, but there are doubtless many cases where they are not caught. I also read an article about the seizure of Mike Lindell's phone and the seizure by the FBI of the phones of other people who worked in the Trump campaign. Apparently there are laws against "tampering with election equipment" and something about hacking into "protected computers," and it is the view of the FBI that it is "tampering" for election officials to inspect voting machines after an election to see if the equipment had been altered (or designed) to report inaccurate results. In other words, it's a crime to look for evidence of election fraud, and if people talk about it, it's "conspiracy." This could implicate many states that tried to audit their elections after 2020. It gives me the impression that the new charges are a cover-up. I am not a Republican either, I am fiercely independent, and the main reason I don't support Republicans fully is because of the Republicans' over-attachment to religion. If the Left wants a Communist dictatorship, the Right seems to want a Christian dictatorship. They keep promulgating this notion that Christianity is the only answer to "Godless Communists." If the Right keeps pushing abortion to the forefront and letting it take all the attention away from individual rights and freedoms (which religion doesn't really support anyway), then I might just give up on them... but I oppose dictatorship regardless of which party runs it, and so I won't support one dictatorship to oppose the other.

Corporations kowtow because they pretty much owe their existence to the favor of the government. What we need is a separation of state and economics and recognition of the individual right to production and trade.

Yes, but that doesn't make it an initiation of force. An initiation of force has to be a deliberate choice, but lots of other things are also deliberate choices, and that doesn't make them initiations of force.

So for example if the risk of killing someone is 7%, that's okay, but if it rises to 8% then it counts as initiating force? That doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter what the actual percentages are, either. An increase of risk cannot "rise" to the level of physical force. The distinction is not a matter of how much risk it is, but of whether it's a matter of deliberate choice or not. The initiation of force can only be done by deliberate choice. Failure to get vaccinated is not an initiation of force. Forcing someone to get vaccinated, is.

The word "can" denotes a potential. Actually the word "danger" has to do with a potential. There is such a thing as recklessly endangering others, but in order to be reckless you have to do something. It is not enough that you exist and could conceivably contract a contagious virus which others could then catch. The risk if someone leaves a gun lying around is man-made. The risk of a virus is metaphysically given.

You can't "retaliate" against a potentiality, only an actuality. This is why retaliation allows you to lock up a murderer, but not to lock up a "potential murderer." As long as free will exists, everybody is a "potential murderer." No virus is necessary for someone to potentially commit murder, and there is no vaccine to prevent the possibility, either. To use force against the "potentially guilty" is to use force against the actually innocent.

I partially disagree with this. Consciousness has requirements, and if you remove the requirements, the consciousness no longer exists. However, nature does not require consciousness. It does not need anyone to be aware of it. It exists regardless of consciousness. So removing the requirements of consciousness does not destroy nature (or even affect it). For example, nuclear fusion existed (e.g., in the sun) before it was discovered. It existed even though no one was aware of it. If civilization falls and people again become unaware of it, it will still exist. The same thing is true of distant galaxies, neutrinos, and other discoveries.

Or maybe conscious intelligence is part of (but not all of) nature, the way a banana peel is part of (but not all of) a banana...

I've had very little experience with meditation, but what experience I do have makes me think as follows: There is an aspect of consciousness called focus. You can choose what to focus on. You can focus on things around you now, or you can focus on your own body, or memories, or ideas, or hypothetical situations, etc. Peikoff writes about the fact that focus is a choice, and you can choose to drop out of focus entirely, and he compares being out of focus to being drunk. But if you choose to be in focus, you have a choice of what to be in focus on (and you can also focus on that choice, itself). It seems to me that focus is directly linked to consciousness, to the point that, if and to the extent that you drop out of focus, you are not really conscious at that time. And on the other hand, if you are conscious, you have to focus on something. Meditation encourages you to limit your focus, but without giving up control over it. So I don't think it is like being drunk or asleep. It encourages you to remove one thing after another from your mind, and maybe the point is to see what's left after you take away all the objects of focus, or maybe the point is to learn how to control what you focus on. Being able to control what you are in focus on could be a valuable skill. When I try to be creative I often find myself distracted by the slightest things, but later when I get into it, the house could catch fire and I'd be working too intently to notice. On the other hand I have never fully been able to banish all objects of focus from my mind. Instead I flail about trying to find other things to focus on. I'm terrible at meditating. Napoleon said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that his mind was like a chest of drawers, that each open drawer was something he was thinking about, and that if he closed all the drawers, he fell asleep. (As for the "consciousness conscious only of itself," if I recall, that was Aristotle's definition of the Prime Mover which supposedly caused all the world's motion, and Christian philosophers later would say that was God. So I think the intent in Galt's speech was to refute that point, but he couldn't go into depth about it there.)

This thread has been like that long fist fight in John Carpenter's They Live. -- "Put on the damn sunglasses!" -- "No!" Decades of dealing with religious people has taught me that some people get the facts correct but then draw incorrect and sometimes "rigged" conclusions from those facts. The correct solution to this is to throw out their "rigged" conclusions and draw one's own conclusions. It is not correct to say that, since their conclusions are wrong, the facts that led to them must also be wrong. That's not how reasoning works. You can't just say "well X is religious so his facts must be wrong; he is just making them up to support his religion." Often, such people are willing to accept the importance of having evidence, which is a point in their favor if you ask me. They will present correct evidence. But then they are using (some) bad abstractions to weigh that evidence, and they don't understand that it is necessary (and possible) to verify whether the abstractions are based on reality. They take their abstractions as givens. Lower than the people "drawing the wrong conclusions" are people like the "mainstream media," who frequently roll out conclusions -- and repeat them over and over -- but they never show any facts at all that allegedly lead to those conclusions. If you ask for such facts you get an argument from intimidation, like, "you couldn't possibly be one of those people who disbelieves us, could you?" For example, I don't know how many times I've heard the phrase "Trump's false claims about the election." That phrase is an evaluation, but they repeat it over and over, word for word. They repeat "ready-made" evaluations like that for a lot of subjects. Where is the evidence for their evaluations? Well, if you don't already know the evidence, you must be one of those people. They smear Ayn Rand in the same way. They echo a lot of ready-made conclusions about her, but they rarely have the quotes from her to back them up (and when they do they are quoting her out of context, which is enough to fool the kind of people who already wouldn't be caught dead reading one of her books because their minds are already made up.) They do the same thing with Trump's speeches. An unsupported "ready-made" evaluation is arbitrary in and of itself, and forces most thinking people to seek out alternative sources of information. It is possible that some of these alternative sources are lying, but if that were the case, it would be easy to show it, with more facts and context. However, the people presenting this information know this; they understand the importance of getting their facts right, even if their abstractions are wrong. The mainstream media is more like "trust us," which is suspicious. So put on the damn sunglasses. p.s. Mostly I stay out of this Russia stuff because I don't trust either side. I've already discussed the US side, which acts like the "mainstream media" above. However, the Russians, being at war, can lie boldly about facts, and then shoot anybody who threatens to expose the truth. That option is not available to the religious people in the US.

Man is the "rational animal." An animal lives or dies on its own; it is not connected to other animals. So it is with Man. We don't extend the concept of "animal" into "unborn animals" and even a chicken's unhatched egg is not an "animal" yet. It's fine to have compassion and all, but emotions are not tools of cognition. If you choose to bring a child into the world, you have a responsibility to raise him (or her) to the point where he can fend for himself, and these days that includes a requirement for a good education, but you don't have a responsibility (e.g., toward all the millions of needy children all over the world) if you don't have a choice. Abortion makes a choice possible where it otherwise might not have been, and in that sense it is a good thing. Of course, whenever you make a choice possible, you make a wrong choice possible, but in a free country other people's wrong choices are not my problem, and even if they are a problem for "God" or for "society," I disagree with the notion of taking those choices away. That path leads to taking away all choices. -- p.s. if you think it's wrong to murder your children by having abortions, why is it okay to murder them by not having sex? ... ok, that was a joke... I guess it's interesting that in the religious mindset, giving birth is not important, having sex ("conception") is the important thing, and any time you have sex and it does not end in a childbirth, it's a sin, and, in their minds, a crime tantamount to murder... p.p.s. Using taxes to pay for someone else's abortion is a bad thing because it takes away their choice of what to do with their money.

My "conspiracy theory" is that people wrote books hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago, and then died of old age, but many people today are still following those books, and their actions come out to be coordinated even if they do not communicate with each other at all, because they are following the same books. That may not be true for much longer. The environmentalists are now banning nitrogen fertilizer in places. If this becomes widespread, billions of people will starve, and I think the environmentalists would welcome that as "less of a load on the Earth." (Of course Peikoff quoted one of them as saying "we can only hope that the right virus comes along," and along comes COVID-19...) The selfishness of self-defense is a virtue. (I use "selfishness" here in the Ayn Rand sense, which could be described with redundancy as "selfishness without victims.") There is something in Atlas Shrugged (probably from Ragnar Danneskjold) about the killed attacker achieving the only destruction he has any right to achieve -- his own. And I suppose it's okay to regard it as a sad thing if someone commits suicide, perhaps more so if they do it at your hands, as it were... Technically the Left is correct that they are "more Christian than the Christians," in the sense that they are more consistent about self-sacrifice than the Republicans. The Republicans support both freedom and Christianity, even though consistency would make it an either-or choice. A lot of Republicans are too anti-conceptual to see the contradictions, and they don't want to see them. (They sometimes argue that such inconsistencies prove that reason is inadequate by itself and that religion is necessary, but this argument is circular, because it is religion that creates the inconsistencies in the first place.) In the past I have interacted with atheist groups, but was disappointed that they wanted to be "Good without God" which suggests that if you take God out of the Bible you can get something good. Thomas Jefferson also tried that, writing his own Bible with the miracles edited out, or so I've read. But if you secularize Christianity and make it more consistent, you get Communism, as Ayn Rand observed. Thomas Paine ended up a Communist, if I remember correctly... (I don't recall the chronology around this.) Ayn Rand was right to call selfishness (as she defined it) a virtue. American intellectuals have been unwilling to embrace what she said (or even read it I think), but what is left of the originally American sense of life seems to understand it perfectly (without reading Rand or knowing that she provides a logical basis for it). It is this sense of life that the Left seeks to destroy, and they are trying to use Christianity as a tool with which to do it. I hope this is not successful; I would hope it undermines support for Christianity instead, but far too many people would rather give up consistency.