necrovore
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Posts posted by necrovore
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Apparently the zombie apocalypse campaign was older than I thought... it's possible that it was brought to my attention years after it started but before it retired.
(Not editing my original post because of possibility of messing up the link.)
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29 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:
Can you give some examples of the CDC saying that?
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55 minutes ago, EC said:
That would mean those people would have to had advanced knowledge years prior to the pandemic of the existence of the covid virus
Well there was also all that "cute and campy" stuff, before Covid-19, about how we should prepare for a "zombie apocalypse." Remember any of that? That was coming out of the CDC and being circulated among other government agencies, but it also came out in the news.
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7 hours ago, monart said:
I'm curious: Why wouldn't it surprise you? And what would it mean for this SC2/covid controversy if Mr Eckert were working for CDC/FDA?
I wrote that in jest; it's an exaggeration. However, it's a known propaganda technique to discredit the truth by associating it with various crank theories, so that when people encounter the truth, they will think that it's just another crank theory.
This is similar to the way that if a group wants to peacefully protest something, you could plant some violent people in amongst the protesters, so that the whole group can then be blamed for the violence.
I remember seeing a lot of news in the mainstream media about "anti-vaxxers," starting maybe a year or so before Covid-19 appeared. This news was about people who objected to the requirement that their children, in order to be enrolled in school, have to be vaccinated for polio, mumps, measles, etc., and usually it was stated that their objections were religious in nature, or based on the (disproved I think) notion that vaccines cause autism, and so it was based on crackpottery. I remember at the time being puzzled about why their stories were being "pushed" so much by the news media. Of course, once Covid-19 came out, it became obvious: news about the "anti-vaxxers" had been spread deliberately, in advance, so that when the Covid-19 "vaccine" was introduced on short notice, anybody who objected to it, even doctors, even if their objections were scientifically legitimate, could be declared to just be more "anti-vaxxers," i.e., cranks who could be ignored.
When you have populations of millions of people, it is often possible to find cranks rather than having to create them. (I am inclined to think that Mr. Eckert is probably a crank, if he objects to the whole science of virology... I do remember a writer republished on Zero Hedge claiming that "there is no such thing as a virus," but I don't know if that's him, but it is a crank thing to say.) So it's unlikely that Mr. Eckert is actually a CDC or FDA "plant" put there for the purpose of discrediting others. It could be that people at the CDC and FDA are deliberately trying to give him more prominence than he deserves, deliberately promoting him to make people think he's is somehow typical of the "alternatives" to themselves, in order to get people to discredit all alternatives to the CDC and FDA.
(I also remember in one of Ayn Rand's essays, she pointed out how "The John Birch Society" was lumped in with some other things it didn't belong with, and that is an example of the same sort of technique at work.)
It is because of the use of propaganda techniques like this that you have to think when reading alternative media, but this kind of propaganda is also why you have to read the alternative media in the first place.
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In defense of Dr. Kammerer I would say that knowledge is hierarchical.
It's much easier to prove the existence of Covid-19 if you can count on, say, a science of virology, which has, over a period of decades, developed techniques to identify the existence of various viruses.
If Mr. Eckert acknowledges the validity of virology and merely disputes the particular virus or family of viruses, then the proof is probably easy, for a competent virologist.
It becomes much harder if Mr. Eckert disputes the validity of the whole science of virology, because then Dr. Kammerer would have to prove that before getting to the part about Covid-19.
Virology itself rests on other discoveries, and if Mr. Eckert disputes those, too, then Dr. Kammerer could be in for a very long slog.
The same kind of thing happens when trying to prove evolution to Christians.
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13 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:
So then why can’t I sue a contractor for defective workmanship 20 years ago?
Well, good news: if the contractor changes careers into politics, and runs for office, and is in the wrong political party -- then you can!
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1 hour ago, DavidOdden said:
Not every bad idea is Marxist. The Republican party is full of bad ideas and bad philosophy, but it isn’t all Marxist.
Bad precedents set in the course of persecuting Trump can also be used by religionists later.
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13 hours ago, Boydstun said:
(I'd imagine Mr. Trump's former boast that you can grab 'em by the pussy if you are a star [entered as pertinent evidence in the present case] probably added some weight against his claim of innocence in the present case.)
It's completely improper to consider such a thing to be "evidence."
It's like saying Johnny Depp's performance in Sweeney Todd is "evidence" that he cut someone's throat.
Some rap music has lyrics that convey certain attitudes toward women, which would probably not look good if those rappers were accused of rape, but I think it's improper to consider those lyrics as "evidence" that the rappers committed rape. It's entirely arguable that the rappers say that stuff, not because it's true, but because they think it sells more records.
It seems even more improper that such statements should be used against Trump, but similar statements made by his accuser (and cited in the William Brooks piece), which would tend to reduce her credibility, didn't seem to be considered.
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I remember learning as a kid that the reason people get colds and flu during the winter is not because they go outside and get it, but because they stay inside with other people who may have colds or flu. This is what allows colds and flu to spread.
On that basis, I would have expected lockdowns to increase people's exposure to Covid. Something like walking on the beach alone, which would have gotten you arrested in some places during the lockdowns, is actually safer than being locked in a building with other people.
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p.s. @George Adams CPA MBA I did not see a Table of Contents for your book. Is there one publicly available? I like to have a vague idea what's in a book when I'm considering a purchase.
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1 hour ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:
Kant’s idea of built in concepts is parallel to Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar built into human brains.
The usual argument for that idea is that young children frequently use nouns and verbs correctly without knowing what "nouns" and "verbs" are. The problem with that argument is that such children spend a lot of time around adults who use nouns and verbs correctly because they do know what they are, and thus the children have a lot of examples, and they will develop a sense of what matches up with the examples and what doesn't, and they also get corrections from the adults.
I'll agree with EC that "there are no built-in concepts." The senses have certain features "built in" such as the ability of your eyes to automatically adapt to the ambient light level, but these are not "concepts." They are pre-conceptual.
If there is something in the brain like some kind of pre-emphasis for nouns and verbs, then it is also pre-conceptual.
34 minutes ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem's showed that some propositions in math can neither be proved nor disproved. The piercing eyes of Math have a blind spot.
In Ayn Rand's philosophy there are two kinds of propositions (not confined to math) which can neither be proved or disproved.
The first kind is axioms. Unlike mathematical axioms, philosophical axioms are self-evidencies which have to be used and asserted even in any attempt to deny them. The three main axioms are existence, consciousness, and identity, although there are a handful of corollary axioms.
The second kind is the arbitrary, which are statements designed to be impervious to evidence or proof. Kurt Godel discovered the mathematical equivalent of those.
34 minutes ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:Quantum Mechanics, especially Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, shows that there are limits to knowledge at the physical level.
Before quantum mechanics was discovered, our knowledge was even more limited
I don't think Ayn Rand made any claims that require (or promise) such "unlimited" knowledge. In fact, I think she sided with Aristotle in saying that the infinite only denotes a potentiality; any actual quantity is finite.
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I should recommend a couple of books:
Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
David Harriman's Induction in Physics and Philosophy.
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It's likely the government is covering something up, but I think it's outlandish to conclude that the virus doesn't exist. More likely it does, but the reason the government knows it exists, is something like, certain people created it in a lab. The government doesn't want that fact to get out. They want to deny responsibility. So what you get is, "The virus exists, but we can't tell you how we know that."
I suppose some people think that if they make up some crazy story, they can pressure the government into disproving it by revealing the truth. That doesn't work.
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On 2/3/2024 at 2:18 PM, Jon Letendre said:
One thing that really sticks out to me is that in my experience with leftists, Trump haters, democrats, liberals, they never, and I mean never, bring facts to me that I didn't already know about.
Whereas they are constantly responding to me with "what? I never heard that. You think that's true? Where could I look into that?" LATER: "OK, so it is true, but so what?" This happens to me over and over and over. They can't immediately see the SO WHAT because of SO MUCH more they don't know about, but good luck explaining any that to one of them.
They are not informed.
AND THAT'S OK.
But why they won't take the responsible and logical next step of not voting I truly don't understand.
I don't think it's OK. It's evasion, pure and simple.
Among some people familiar with Objectivism this evasion sometimes takes the form of "don't look in the closet, because anything you see in there is arbitrary and has to be dismissed from rational consideration."
When the mainstream media is very biased and refuses to report facts that don't support their point of view, one has no choice but to look for those facts in alternative media. It's difficult to dig through alternative news sources where facts that you can't find anywhere else are intermingled with articles about the Second Coming of Jesus and who knows what else. The alternative press consists of "rags"; it consists of scruffy rebels with small budgets; all they have is whatever facts they can find to report on. If they find important facts, they try to get them out, and usually have to square off against official and unofficial censorship in order to do it. But then they'll sometimes reach very wrong conclusions with those facts, and this is because many of their abstract principles are not reality-based, and are neither mainstream nor Objectivist. The facts they report are never the ones that poke the holes in their own mistaken principles, but they are, nevertheless, facts, and often poke holes in establishment principles.
What you have to do to find out the truth amounts to "rag-picking." You have to go through the "rags" anyway. Their facts are often undisputed, but their principles may be wrong. Keep the facts, discard the Jesus. And of course discard the antisemitism and the UFO aliens.
The thing to understand about "alternative facts" is that they are not alternatives to facts; they are facts that the establishment doesn't want anyone to know and would prefer everyone to ignore.
Maybe some people haven't learned to distinguish between statements of fact (which can, in principle, be verified, or wrong) and statements of opinion (which rest on abstractions, and those abstractions might be true, false, or arbitrary). Or perhaps they know how to make the distinction but find it to be a lot of effort. Or maybe they think that, since the rag-writers' principles are wrong, their facts have to be wrong, too. It's much easier to go along with the mainstream press where everything is neatly packaged for you and you don't have to think about it.
And then there are people who have become part of the "aristocracy" in some way or other, and they guard their positions jealously, and they need to be seen looking down their noses at certain facts because those facts are socially unacceptable among the aristocracy. (The aristocracy seems to include the legal profession, which has become an aristocracy itself, and has developed its own principles and traditions which are older than Objectivism, some of which are probably incorrect in light of it, and will be difficult to make correct.)
There is one more important thing.
Most people understand deductive logic and reasoning, so they start with certain principles and then plug in the facts and deduce downward from there. Deduction has been well-understood since ancient Greece, and it's also easy to write a deductive argument on a piece of paper and check it for correctness.
However, there is also an inductive side to reasoning, and this is not as well understood -- but almost all of the arguments for Objectivism are inductive in nature. Induction is the only way to come up with new principles. Induction is why Ayn Rand wrote novels and essays and not just syllogisms. Induction is like figure-and-ground to deduction; whereas deduction requires examples, induction requires for its proof an absence of counter-examples. So it is reasonable, as part of an inductive argument, to show that you have really looked for counter-examples, everywhere, systematically, and not found any. This is also how you prove Newton's Laws. This is why evasion is a fallacy that you don't much hear about outside of Objectivism. Evasion is almost completely inapplicable to deduction. Evasion "works" to prop up incorrect abstractions by suppressing the facts that would disprove them. The arbitrary, in turn, is just a larger example of evasion; it ensures the necessary absence of counter-examples by suppressing all of reality. The arbitrary is that which is impervious to evidence. You can't identify something as arbitrary unless you can identify at least the type of evidence that it would be impervious to; it's even better if you can identify the evidence itself.
But that requires reading those "rags"...
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2 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:
Can you tell me what this stands for and how I can find it? When I tried I got a lot of stuff about some bank and a little about the Hawaii Bicycling League.
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37 minutes ago, Boydstun said:
Trump has been adjudicated in a civil trial to have committed a rape.
Because the standard of proof is lower in civil trials -- "preponderance of the evidence" instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt."
You may remember they found no shortage of people who were "raped" by Kavanaugh, too. Or by Julian Assange. Or by Russell Brand. Anybody who is inconvenient to the government.
The law under which Trump was convicted had been modified recently in order to make convictions like that possible.
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8 hours ago, DavidOdden said:
The vote fraud card is very dangerous since it is used by both winners and losers in actually fair but not 100% perfect elections in many Third World nations, and often leads to riots and in some cases military intervention.
The country is becoming so divided that there are likely to be riots regardless of who wins or why.
However, the "vote fraud card" is being used legitimately: many laws governing elections in some states are written not to prevent fraud but to ensure that fraud remains possible, like for example making it illegal to require that voters show ID when they vote (which makes it easy for one person to vote in-person for another person), or making it illegal to require that they show proof of citizenship when they register to vote (which makes it easy for non-citizens to vote), or making it difficult to remove voters from voter rolls when they leave the state, which causes absentee ballots to automatically be mailed to their former addresses, so that those ballots can be voted by someone else and mailed back and counted. (Not much is done to verify that the signatures match; the Democrats apply pressure that "every vote be counted" regardless of its legitimacy. You wouldn't want some poor slob's vote not to be counted because he couldn't sign his name...)
Of course voter fraud is still illegal on paper, but in the big cities, shoplifting and battery are still illegal on paper, and you can see what happens when the enforcement mechanisms against those laws are gutted, even though the laws remain on the books.
(This is not to mention those allegedly "non-partisan" non-profits which secure exclusive access to voter rolls on the basis of their non-partisanship and then use it only to the advantage of the Democrats. A Republican-leaning organization that did such a thing would be shut down by the government, but not a Democrat-leaning one.)
There are UN agencies and such that issue guidance (information) to third-world countries about how to run fair elections which would have credible results for the people living there. (Not to mention those of other countries...) Laws like the ones above actually violate this guidance. There are also other countries that have democratic elections without these problems. In Europe, for example, you have to have a government-issued ID to vote, and mail-in ballots are illegal.
So the problem is that fraud is already baked into the system. This does not mean Trump is guaranteed to lose, but it does mean he will have to get a super-majority, maybe 60% of the vote, in order to look like he has gotten 51%. So he would do better not to drive away independents.
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Since the Democrats control the press and have (long since) rejected the idea of objective reporting, it should be borne in mind that they have motive, means, and opportunity to lie about Trump, exaggerate about him, take his statements out of context, and so forth. This absolutely includes lying about his personality and about his various alleged transgressions. I'm sure they would be perfectly willing to lie about it under oath, too, because they call it "their own truth," and they think, in pure primacy-of-consciousness fashion, that if it's widely enough believed, that makes it true. (They have also found that they can "make it true" by simply having one of their judges rule that it's true, without evidence and without cross-examination.)
As a result, I can't be sure that Trump is anywhere near as bad as they say, and I don't see how anyone else can be sure, either.
I am worried about the religious wing of the Republican party. I know such people actually exist. Peikoff even mentioned them in The DIM Hypothesis. However, I think that the overly religious people are a liability to the Republicans, because they drive people of other religions (or of no religion) out of the party. I also think Trump knows this, and this is why he has recommended compromise on abortion for electability purposes.
I also think that the Democrats have motive, means, and opportunity to exaggerate how much influence the religious people have, because they know full well that religion drives people away from the Republicans, and that's to the advantage of the Democrats. This misleads the religious people themselves into thinking they are more influential than they really are, and that, plus the fact that the Democrats are deliberately trying to poke the religionists to make them crazy, leads the religionists to make louder and more ridiculous demands, which only helps the Democrats more, even if only by turning would-be Republican votes into non-votes.
As a result, I can't be sure that the Republican party as a whole is really as religious as they say.
But we don't have to rely on the press. Trump and Biden both have actual track records. What were things like from 2016 to 2020 when Trump was actually President? I don't remember a dictatorship. (Although Roe vs. Wade being overturned was a low point and has ultimately led to chaos.) I remember the whole government bureaucracy trying to sabotage everything Trump did -- I remember them trying to impeach him because he caught Biden getting bribed by Burisma in Ukraine -- but I still think things were much better than they were from 2020 to 2024, when we did have a (Covid) dictatorship for a while.
53 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:Specifically, illegally declaring (selected parts) of the constitutionally-mandated election procedure (the counting of electoral votes) to be invalid.
Yeah, and that would have worked, too, if those January 6th rioters hadn't barged into the Capitol and... oh, wait... Trump was supposed to have arranged that... but why would Trump disrupt his own party's rejection of the vote count? Hmmm...
(Actually I don't think it was illegal to reject electoral votes, and I don't think those processes are there merely to be ceremonial rubber stamps... in fact, fraud might be a good reason to reject electoral votes...)
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1 hour ago, Boydstun said:
I seriously question this.
I suppose different people run into different obstacles.
Some problems are hard in their own right, others are artificially made hard (or harder) by bureaucrats. (I'm not talking about cases where you have to infer that a bureaucrat was at work. I'm talking about when you are forced to deal with them directly, or through paperwork.)
Some people run into more problems of the former kind, some run into more of the latter kind. I've run into both kinds.
I don't think an Objectivist would consider it proper to seek political solutions to problems that are not political in the first place.
(Sorry I keep editing this post, but it occurs to me too that in The Fountainhead, Howard Roark had no difficulty getting his architectural license, even though he was expelled from school. I think in real life the bureaucrats would have denied him the license, probably for the same reasons he was expelled... and they might also have kept him from trying to graduate from a different school and getting the license that way... but then his eventual triumph would not have been possible.)
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[was a duplicate, please delete]
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On 10/27/2022 at 12:36 PM, Boydstun said:
Kyary, my impression is that there are some who classify themselves as Objectivists who complain that the only practical merit of the philosophy is politics (and although none of Rand's fictional protagonists spend their lives in political advocacy, and those Objectivists do), complain that we are all not up for joining them in their political advocacy and their mental preoccupation with politics. There has to be a bottom ten percent of the class. They are wrong in thinking the only or most valuable practical use of the philosophy is political activism and political reform. The most important is its effect on one's own life and mind.
Something further needs to be said about this.
I think a lot of young people, including young Objectivists (and myself when I was younger), have big dreams about what they want to do with their lives, like wanting to produce and sell products and services of various kinds, wanting to be a John Galt, or a Dagny Taggart, or a Hank Rearden, but in their own fields -- and then they run into a bureaucracy (or "political class") that doesn't want to give them the freedom to do that, places big pointless obstacles in their paths, and regards them as "potential criminals" just for being independent thinkers. Then these young people find that most people are indifferent to their situation, or are even on the side of the bureaucrats. (They may also find supporters who are sadly powerless...) Young people who know Objectivism know there is no good reason for this situation to exist, but it seems that persuasion might be possible, because freedom of the press still exists. As a result, they find themselves "drafted" into politics, at least as a hobby, even though neither politics nor philosophy was their original choice. Meanwhile they end up in their second or third (or twelfth) choice of career because it's the only one they're allowed into, and they have bills to pay. Very few people, Objectivist or otherwise, can provide for themselves as professional intellectuals or advocates of freedom.
In a free country one wouldn't have to worry about politics.
In a mixed economy, the political side of philosophy may be more "practical" than one's preferred choice of career, but if so, this is because the bureaucracy has made it more practical. So this is a characteristic of the mixed economy, not so much of Objectivism or its advocates. (And don't worry, it will disappear either when the country becomes mostly free or when it becomes mostly totalitarian; in the latter case there is no freedom of speech anymore.)
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I also did write that the "invasion" has to be dealt with, earlier in the thread.
There is a difference in whether you regard the "invasion" as typical or not. If you regard it as typical, if you decide that there are always going to be people trying to invade your country, if you decide that every time you end one invasion another one will start, if you regard every immigrant as a potential invader, then you will design your country as if it is under a permanent state of siege, and this will have implications for your whole society, and freedom will become impossible because it's "too dangerous." This can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy in various ways.
If the "invasion" is the exception rather than the rule, then it should be stamped out. But we need to actually do that, identify the causes of the invasion and put an end to it, rather than planning for a permanent state of siege, just like we would want to end a war decisively, rather than allowing a permanent state of war.
Treating immigration as a permanent invasion is similar to the way leftists deal with gun control. They believe that everybody is evil, everybody is a power-lusting psychopath who would enjoy murdering people for kicks. I guess that's because when they walk around in Washington DC, that's the only kind of person they see, even when they look in the mirror. So they favor a police state where everybody is monitored, speech is carefully controlled, nobody is armed, and so nobody can act out the evils in their souls (but on the other hand people can do anything they want if it's for "social justice," or if their name is Biden, or if they work for the government, in which case the usual rules do not apply).
If you think that people are basically good, if you think that people would only use force in self-defense in most cases, you would not have anything to fear from regular people owning guns, and so you wouldn't support gun control. You would recognize that guns don't kill people, criminals do, and that sometimes self-defense is necessary and proper, so it would be proper to outlaw murder but not gun possession per se. But then the leftists would say that you're hopelessly naïve, that your ideals are entirely theoretical, and with all the mass shootings out there, you need to "deal with reality" and ban guns.
The same kinds of arguments can be used against any form of freedom, whether it's freedom to cross borders or even freedom of speech (which, according to Biden, "kills people").
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1 minute ago, Jon Letendre said:
Nice try. Except that "one irrational person comes along" is actually an intentional invasion.
Good talk. Thanks.
I never knew that a one-person invasion would be sufficient to dispense with immigration.
Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny
in Psychology and Self Improvement
Posted · Edited by necrovore
The "mainstream narrative" is subject to the same standards as any other "narrative" -- and sometimes fails them, especially lately.
I still think it's psychologizing.
On the other hand there are cranks, quacks, and crackpots out there, and the only way to identify them is that their claims clash with reality.
If you have a proper hierarchy of knowledge then you can use abstractions you have already proved to identify false claims. However, this only works to the extent that your abstractions are solid all the way down. Lots of people reason as if their beliefs have been "proved" when those beliefs are not true at all.
In a mixed economy, it's easy to imagine that corrupt people could work their way up to the top. These days I'm not so sure it's even necessary to imagine, because you can look at the people at the top and see that they are corrupt.
However, it is possible to have a medical industry without corruption, and I think such an industry would accept the existence of viruses on the basis of the scientific evidence.
Well it's a good thing we have people like you here to point this stuff out
But really, it does not seem that @monart is claiming to speak on behalf of Ayn Rand or Objectivism on these matters, and also, as long as it is an open forum, we don't have to worry too much about falsehoods going uncontested.
Besides, people shouldn't believe everything they read, anyway.