necrovore

I spotted this article: https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/five-reasons-ayn-rand-loved-united-states-america-right-live-ones-own-judgment It's positive and covers the basics for somebody who might have never heard of Ayn Rand before. I did not know that there was any news outlet that would still publish such a thing. (Many are too Leftist or too Christian.)

Actually it seems like it would be the opposite, that the United States consists of savages and Objectivists have the right to conquer them by force I think what Ayn Rand was getting at was not the notion that "if you are too primitive to understand rights, you don't get any for yourself" -- the real case is more like people who come to understand rights, who explicitly reject them, but who then say, "Since you allegedly respect rights, you should respect mine, even though I don't respect yours (or my own people's). You have to treat me in a civilized manner, because that is your culture, but I don't have to treat you in a civilized manner, because that is my culture." That's the sort of thing she objected to, the double standard, and I think some of the more "primitive" cultures, on encountering civilization, develop that attitude. And so do Socialists and Communists and other dictators. That's the sort of thing that eventually makes self-defense necessary, and self-defense, being a use of force, can sometimes be ugly, and if you take it entirely out of context, it (sometimes) looks just like murder.

"Inflection point" in math: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/InflectionPoint.html

You are equivocating between natural rights and legal rights. All humans have natural rights (life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, derivatives such as freedom of speech, right to a fair trial, etc.). This includes children, who have "guardians" who are supposed to protect their rights. Legal rights are different. As far as contracts, there is the question of competency; a contract shouldn't be binding if the person signing it doesn't understand it or is not capable of holding up their end. This can apply not only to children but also to elderly people with dementia or people with brain damage or the like. Further, some people have the right to serve on a jury and others don't. Some people have the right to vote and others don't (e.g., because they are visiting foreign tourists).

Children are people; they have the same rights as anybody else. The argument I'm about to make was made by either Rand or Peikoff, but I am not sure I'm remembering it correctly, and it certainly isn't word for word: Generally if you own a boat you have the right to decide who may board and who may not, and you may also have the right to change your mind, but that doesn't mean you can take someone out into the middle of the ocean, and then decide that they no longer have permission to be on your boat, and throw them off. I support abortion because no one has the right to another person's body. But once the child is born (and especially if abortion was available, which makes the birth of the child a deliberate choice), its helplessness puts it in the same position as a passenger on your boat, in the middle of the ocean. You can't just throw the child off. You have to "get it to shore," so to speak. Transferring the child to "another boat" (i.e., adoption) is acceptable. But you have to at least arrange that the child can eventually reach a position where he can take care of himself. I think that's all that's required, although it's nice if you can give your kid a good education. Good education is hard to find anyway nowadays...

When you say: That is the first thing you said which is not correct. Trying to "derive things from the axioms" is a fundamentally deductive approach, but you cannot derive anything from the axioms. What you have to do is start with perception, integrate the facts into concepts and principles, and only then you can apply the principles to new facts by using deduction. You have to do this in such a way that the axioms are not contradicted; that is what the axioms are for.

It looks like the problem here is that you are trying to use deduction instead of induction.

The Democrats are doing it dishonestly in this case. They represent ERIC to the states as non-partisan, but that isn't true.

The article itself has something to say about that: That being said, I do think the abortion issue is a giant footgun for the Republicans, and there have been articles to the effect that Republicans would get more support from the general public by dropping the issue. It will be disappointing, and perhaps even alarming, if 2024 shapes up to be a choice between two dictators.

Found some interesting articles via Zero Hedge. (Zero Hedge is an aggregator of news and opinion from many other sources.) I think these first two articles go together: (1) what happened to the "red wave" in 2022? Basically the Democrats were able to mobilize "unlikely voters" who were ignored in the polls because of being unlikely, but this was mostly done only in certain states: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mystery-midterm-what-happened-red-wave (2) how ERIC and CEIR are being used to "get out the vote" but only for Democrats: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/voter-registration-machine-flipping-states-blue These go together because the second may be the mechanism by which the first is accomplished. Also I found an article about voter fraud in Wisconsin: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/150000-votes-2020-election-not-tied-valid-address-wisconsin-election-watchdog. Curious that the evidence should "disappear" like it has. (Note that due to a possible bug concerning links, I don't think I can edit this post if it is wrong...)

It would take whole books to answer all these questions...

I would like to recommend that these posts about immigration be moved to another thread. I'm not sure what to title the new thread, though. "Public property" is sort of an anomaly, since in a capitalist system all property should be privately owned, but I suppose public property could be considered "jointly owned" by taxpayers (or, without taxes, by those who voluntarily fund the government). "Government property" such as courthouses and military bases is also jointly owned by taxpayers, but it is not open to the public for general purposes. "Public property" has to be run in such a way that it does not infringe the rights of any minority, and this would require that, if even one property owner wants to allow immigrants on his property, the immigrants must also be allowed to traverse the pubic property in order to get there. (I think this fits with Doug Morris's point above.)

Actually I never said anything about public property.

If a property owner can say "no trespassing" then a group of property owners can join together into a "jurisdiction" and also say "no trespassing." If, on the other hand, I own property, and I want to allow people to cross it if they want to, then the government is infringing both their rights and mine by prohibiting it. (That being said, I probably cannot legally be a party to people trespassing on the land of other people.)

This is not a court ruling but it at least is a little closer to the court rulings than what I have found in previous recent searches. https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/supreme-courts-decision-not-hear-elections-cases-could-have-serious

I suppose it would also be interesting to look at the 2020 Democratic Primary, where it looked like Bernie Sanders was going to win, but there were some weird anomalies with the vote counting, and it ended up going to Biden. None of that had anything to do with Trump.

They may be able to get the evidence elsewhere. Or they may already have it. Or they may have at least seen it so they know what I'm talking about. I didn't reach my conclusions by having privileged access to information that no one else could have seen. I reached them by means of information that was available to many people at the time. Other people will have seen the same information.

That's a non-sequitur. I may have seen a judge's ruling but be unable to find it. You are free, if you wish, to disagree with me on the basis that I can't find proof, but you are not free to demand that I withdraw my argument merely because I'm unable to prove it to your satisfaction. Someone considering my argument might have better abilities to find the rulings than I have. Nor does my inability to find some piece of evidence or other "prove" that I am irrational or even that my argument is. By such a standard, every rational person would be required to maintain a properly indexed library of everything they have ever seen or heard, so that they can provide proof of all their beliefs on demand. That's absurd.

I have tried to do some basic searches on the Internet and I believe the results are heavily filtered. The thing is, I can't find any information whatever that the "mainstream" media believes to be false, unless the mainstream media is quoting it for the purpose of rebutting it. The only things I can find are things they would deem true. It's far too perfect. In a free country, or on a free Internet, I would expect to find conflicting points of view, just like I would expect to find books in a bookstore which contradict each other, like Rand and Kant. I used to be able to find such things on the Internet, too. Different groups might argue with each other, but each group would have a place where it could speak for itself, and you could use your own judgment to decide which group was correct (if any was). What I'm seeing now is more like when you go into a Christian bookstore and there are no books at all that are critical of Christianity or have anything bad to say about it. They may have disagreements about other issues, but every book says Christianity is great. You wouldn't find atheist authors like Rand in there at all. Somebody who only had access to such bookstores would also have a hard time finding "evidence" that there is anything "wrong" with Christianity. (They might find contradictions, however, either between different pieces of Christian literature, or between the literature and the real world. But they'd have to talk about them in hushed tones, and only with people they could trust.) The same thing happens if you go into a bookstore in a Communist country. There are no books that have anything bad to say about Communism or about the regime. Maybe that's why I can't find any evidence. Paradoxically I'd be more inclined to believe "Trump's claims" were false if I could find them in their original form and find other articles about them that explain why they are false. Instead, all I find is the latter. Like I said, it's far too perfect.

There is no such thing as a "solid fact" on the Internet. You have to look at the real world. [On second thought this statement may be too broad... and at the moment I don't have time to hash it out...] [I will say that historians usually go for primary sources, which means that if they want to find out what Trump was thinking, they would go to his speeches and writings, not to all these third-party judgments about him.]

It seems like you're painting Trump supporters with an overly broad brush. Couldn't it just be that people support Trump because he supports many of the policies they want and opposes many of the policies they don't want? But I guess Trump supporters couldn't be that rational.

But that is not correct, either; there are a lot of people such as Christians who maintain the same inconsistencies throughout their lives, without the irrationality "spreading."

You can allow an opinion without accepting it. You can run a bookstore, for example, without agreeing with all the books you sell, and you can also do it without agreeing with all the customers who buy from you.

That's an example of the kind of falsehood that underlies a dictatorship. What it really means is that ideas spread, and the dictators don't want any ideas to spread that they don't approve of. People have free will about what ideas they believe, but if an idea "has legs" it's usually because there's enough evidence for it that it seems plausible. The regime's disapproval of it only adds fuel to the fire. This is why dictatorial regimes clamp down on communications, as they did in East Germany and the Soviet Union. Gotta keep that "irrationality" from "spreading." It's also why they will demand no end of "evidence" from anybody who disagrees with them, and even if some such evidence is produced, it will never be satisfactory -- but they never have to produce any of their own. The correctness of the dictators themselves is to be regarded as an axiom. The dictators are innocent until proven guilty; the dissenters are guilty until proven innocent. Except that the standards of proof are set so that nothing can ever be proved. This is also why dissenters are usually shot, to prevent their "irrationality" from spreading. Unfortunately for the dictators, shooting dissenters does not work. The dissenters are only messengers, and people's beliefs aren't what matters. Reality is what matters. Reality, and not the regime, is what determines whether beliefs are right or wrong. This is why reality is the regime's greatest enemy. You can deny evidence, you can erase history, but that doesn't make it go away. Existence has primacy over consciousness. History repeats itself because the underlying principles never change. Once of those principles, discovered in the last century or so, is that dictatorship kills people.

That's a non sequitur because it doesn't prove that Trump or his supporters were irrational in the specific ways necessary to have tried to carry out the described "insurrection." Even criminals and psychopaths have "patterns of behavior." This does not fit the pattern of Trump or his supporters (in general). They do not have a history of doing or even advocating this sort of thing. Quite the opposite. (Given that there are tens of millions of Trump supporters, it may be possible to find one or two who have the required profile; these are the kinds of people who could have been tempted to participate in such an insurrection. However, they are neither typical nor influential, as people on the Left try to portray them. Just because you can find a white supremacist who supports Trump doesn't mean that all Trump supporters are white supremacists, and so forth. Stephen King has had fans who are creepy serial killers but that doesn't mean all Stephen King fans are creepy serial killers.) However, the idea that Democrats could have staged it does fit with their pattern. They even rehearsed it, with the Governor Whitmer kidnapping thing. Some counties had more than 100% turnout. The pandemic itself was a fraud, wasn't it? The vote count stopped, in four states simultaneously, at 1:30 in the morning or something, and resumed hours later with a different vote count. For weeks leading up to the election. There was video evidence (shot with cell phones) of observers being violently shut out of vote counting in some counties even though they had the legal right to be present. Those counties ended up having enough votes to flip their states to Biden. This was while counting was still in progress and before Trump could have "lied" yet. It was used (perhaps I should say offered) as evidence in court cases, along with sworn statements, only to be dismissed because overturning an election was considered too severe a remedy.