necrovore
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Posts posted by necrovore
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Looks like they brought out another one: https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/five-ways-ayn-rand-predicted-americas-political-crises-parents-spurned-rise-cancel-culture
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It's good news that this debate is starting to exist.
Meanwhile, this article is on top of Zero Hedge right now: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/once-you-start-censoring-youre-your-way-dystopia-and-totalitarianism-rfk-jr-wrecks-house
RFK says "My views are constantly misrepresented." He points out that some of the things people are saying "are defamations and malignancies that are used to censor me to prevent people from listening to the actual things that I'm saying." (The same sort of thing has been going on for years regarding the views of certain other controversial people, such as Donald Trump and Ayn Rand.) He also says, "Trusting the experts is not a function of science. It is not a function of democracy. It is a function of religion and totalitarianism, and it does not make for a healthier population."
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I wonder if these errors might be a matter of imprecise phrasing. Maybe I am being too generous.
Not all individuals are inherently heroic -- but heroism, when it exists, is an attribute of the individual.
Governments -- when they overstep their proper bounds -- do only end up restricting human freedom, potential, and happiness. However, a government that does not overstep its proper bounds can be helpful in securing human freedom, potential, and happiness.
[Added later] I suppose I missed the big picture, though. You are right that the core of her philosophy is not political.
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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.)
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10 hours ago, InfraBeat said:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Objectivism holds that promoting the general welfare is not a proper role of government. So an Objectivist could not honestly swear to pledge allegiance to that principle. So, if you consider yourself to be an Objectivist and honest, then, by your own advocacy, you don't have a right to be in the United States.
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.
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"Inflection point" in math: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/InflectionPoint.html
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7 hours ago, Easy Truth said:
No, you are making the argument that applies to adults. Children even now, don't have a right to sign contracts. They don't have all rights and there are reasons for that. Not ALL humans have rights. Those who do have them are based on some reasoning. A similar reasoning has to apply to children. What is it?
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).
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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...
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5 hours ago, InfraBeat said:
What is your basis for holding that it is not correct to use deduction in this context? And you'll use induction but not deduction for that basis? What is the first thing I said that you consider to be not correct, especially on account of using deduction?
When you say:
21 hours ago, InfraBeat said:I'm interested in seeing how one would derive ...
Starting with the axioms...
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.
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It looks like the problem here is that you are trying to use deduction instead of induction.
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14 hours ago, Doug Morris said:
It is the Republicans' responsibility to get out the Republican vote. If the Democrats did a better job, this does not make a stolen election.
The Democrats are doing it dishonestly in this case. They represent ERIC to the states as non-partisan, but that isn't true.
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6 hours ago, Boydstun said:
Perhaps the reactionary outlawing of abortion and bootlicking the modern witchdoctors by Republican candidates had something to do with it. Trump blamed failure of anti-abortionists to show up to vote.* And he blamed their boosting of "extreme" anti-abortion measures at the State level for backlash additional to the overthrow of Roe.
It is time (2024), as ever, to vote against any anti-abortionist candidates; at least don't vote for them.
The article itself has something to say about that:
QuoteThe problem is that the highly publicized Dobbs decision was handed down in late June and a draft of the decision had been leaked about seven weeks earlier, in the first week of May. The controversy was in full fury more than five months before Election Day and several months before voting in states offering early voting options. Any effect the abortion issue had on vote choices or turnout decisions of potential voters had more than enough time to be reflected in polling and election expectations well before Election Day or early voting. As such, like the many other existing stable conditions of the election, it does not explain the November surprise.
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.
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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...)
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3 minutes ago, InfraBeat said:
In either case - funders either as taxpayers or as voluntary contributors - would the funders have a moral right to determine all aspects of entry onto public property? Would the funders have a moral right to disallow left-handed people from entering private property? Would such determinations be made by voting? Would the amount funders contribute give them greater weight in voting? If a person missed paying dues one month, could he be disallowed from waking on public sidewalks until he got caught up in his payments?
It would take whole books to answer all these questions...
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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.)
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3 hours ago, InfraBeat said:
But, if I understand, you claim that a jurisdiction does have a moral right to use force to stop people from entering public property in the jurisdiction.
Actually I never said anything about public property.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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2 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:
You can't expect anyone to believe you if you can't provide evidence.
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.
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1 minute ago, Doug Morris said:
You made claims about judges' rulings. I asked you to link to actual examples of such rulings, which you should be able to do if what you say is true. You have given me no response.
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.
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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.
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4 hours ago, Doug Morris said:
So far no one has provided any solid facts, nor any of the links I have requested to back up their claims.
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.]
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16 hours ago, Doug Morris said:
People who do a good enough job of compartmentalizing their inconsistencies may be able to limit the spread. Christianity has had a lot of practice doing this. Trump and his supporters aren't doing it. A big part of Trump's irrationality is a desperate search for personal reassurance. A big part of his supporters' irrationality amounts to Trump worship.
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.
Ayn Rand aritcle on Fox News
in Intellectuals and the Media
Posted
The only value in articles like this is that they may prompt people to investigate Objectivism when they otherwise might never have heard of it (or when they have heard only bad things about it).