necrovore

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.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/cultural-marxism-and-the-corruption-of-common-law-5587345?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge

I am compelled to insert a few technical corrections regarding universal grammar and Chomskian linguistics, which has been invoked here. First, Chomsky has held 1,900 different positions, often 7 at the same time. He is famous for saying “this is implicit in my earlier work”. Boiling away various temporary ornamentations of his, his theory has two aspects: a theory of the “faculty”, and a theory of the substance. Categories like noun, verb, vowel, nasal, quantifier are “things”, the substance, which he has claimed that are in a genetically endowed list of things that we know at birth. Those are the “innate concepts”. Over the years, the size of that list was waxed and waned, right now it is very small and for many practitioners (such as myself) it is null. Then there is the “faculty” aspect, the ability to do things. There too we find a range of views, one being that there is a list of things that you can and cannot do in language, and one that claims that there is little to nothing pre-specified.
My position is that language is one aspect of the faculty of reason (which is itself an aspect of general cognition), so as far as I am concerned, the language faculty is not characterized with any substantive limits. However, language and reasoning still have a nature. It is the ability to structure words and form concepts that are part of human nature, and language is the essential tool for forming concepts and expressing propositions. The problem with radical tabula rasa theory is that you cannot learn a language or a fact with a completely blank brain, thus the conceptual faculty cannot itself be learned (how would a child know to learn “concepts” as opposed to storing every sense-image that they encountered; how would a child learn the principle of conceptual economy rather that the principle of maximal precision?).
A faculty is a built-in ability to create a cognitive structure based on sensory input, and language (general, not a specific language) is the most obvious instance of a faculty. When you learn a language, you do not memorize all of the words and sentences of the language, you learn a small set of atoms, and a set of rules for building larger labels (whole words and sentences). Those rules have a definite nature, which in fact mirrors the hierarchical nature of knowledge plus some knowledge of what a rule does (for instance, unifies two concepts into one, or positions one thing after another). There is a kind of “negative knowledge” to the effect that prime numbers or the Fibonacci sequence do not play a role in grammar, which is not directly stated as such (i.e. no rule computes with a word is in a prime-numbered position, or even an odd-numbered position), instead it simply follows from the fact that that mechanism is not part of the faculty of language, which is universally available to all humans and happens automatically upon exposure to language, unlike the ability to sing on key or compute prime numbers which takes conscious training.
In discussing “Chomskian linguistics”, you have to carefully distinguish Noam Chomsky’s current idiosyncratic beliefs and behaviors, from the theories of those whose interest is the mental mechanism that enables humans to have language. Extreme-nativist Chomsky (P&P theory) is fully incompatible with the Objectivist epistemology, but even Chomsky no longer believes in that, and his linguistic views are much closer to mine, which are, of course, based on Objectivism.

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.

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.

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"...

This post is an hommage to Leonard Peikoff (b. 1933) for his contributions to the philosophy Objectivism. His biggest contribution of written work is his book OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND. His second most important written contribution is his essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD). This was published in THE OBJECTIVIST, a journal edited by Rand (d.1982) and N. Branden, in five installments from May to September of 1967. Peikoff was 33. (Those were the nominal dates of those issues of the journal; at times the journal was behind its target dates for publication.) ADS followed immediately Rand’s series “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” in that journal. Three years before ASD, Peikoff had completed his PhD dissertation THE STATUS OF THE LAW OF CONTRADICTION IN CLASSIC LOGICAL ONTOLOGISM at NYU.
The only substantial supplement to Rand’s theory of concepts since ADS (and two papers by David Kelley in psychology of abstraction in the 80's) is my paper “Universals and Measurement” (2004), which addresses magnitude structure all the world must have if Rand’s model of concept structure is indeed applicable to all term-concepts. https://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php... I hope soon to complete an amplification and recasting of an issue raised within ASD: necessities in truths.
I’d like here to recount my own personal sequence of events concerning Rand and Peikoff. I had been given THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED by a cousin-in-law S. Swift at Christmas 1966. I was a freshman in college. On the first page, the invitation page of ATLAS, beginning “What Moves the World?” Swift had written “Read The Fountainhead first.” On the title page for Part I of ATLAS, he had written “Let your actions be guided by rational choice", which was really good orientation I needed at that time. He had underlined the opening line of that novel. I carefully read them in the summer and fall of 1967. I was in a private mental hospital that summer I read THE FOUNTAINHEAD, and my doctor kept encouraging me to finish it. It saved my life, and thereafter I never again required psychiatric care.
After those novels, I began reading Rand’s nonfiction books that were out at the time, and I read THE OBJECTIVIST, which was at my University library. Peikoff’s ASD introduced me to the Analytic-Synthetic distinction, and over my many years, I have studied its appearances in the history of philosophy and another distinction by that name in the history of mathematics.
In second semester of my freshman year, I had my first course in philosophy, which was mainly an argued layout of all that is, by a Thomist professor, who was superb. He had been trained at the University of Cologne after WWII. But I did not learn of the A-S thread in philosophy until I read Peikoff’s essay on it. I continued to take philosophy courses in college—I minored in it—concluding in my final semester spring 1971 with a seminar on THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, under another superb professor, who was from India and who had been trained at the University of Gottingen. I pursued graduate studies three times in my life, once in physics, twice in philosophy. I had to withdraw for various reasons in all cases, but learned enormously from those studies. I am an independent and inveterate scholar.
I had seen Ayn Rand on the Johnny Carson show at the home of my friend Swift. https://www.youtube.com/playlist... I did not see or hear Peikoff speak until about 1974, when I took a recorded lecture course of his on the history of modern philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/playlist... Very good. During that decade, I was working my way through Fredrick Copleston’s A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. Completed. I took Peikoff’s 1976 recorded lecture course THE PHILOSOPHY OF OBJECTIVISM when it was presented in Evanston, north of Chicago. That greatly renewed my enthusiasm for the philosophy as one of much width and depth.
I read Peikoff’s THE OMINOUS PARALLELS when it came out in 1982. Five years later, Peikoff published his intellectual memoir “My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand” in THE OBJECTIVIST FORUM. I wrote him a letter thanking him for sharing that and telling him how eagerly I was looking forward to his book on Objectivism, stemming from his 1976 lectures, that he had been working on for some time. And how important I thought it was. He thanked me.
In 1991 the book was issued—OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND. It is very fine, accessible to the general educated public, and indeed it proved very important to setting out the philosophy of Ayn Rand in a systematic and comprehensive way, as the philosophy had been developed by the end of her life. That book put Rand’s thought as a comprehensive philosophy more decisively pinned on the map of philosophy. Life accomplishment “as difficult as it is rare.”
(This photo is Peikoff and Rand early in their association.)

 

Objectivism is rooted in practicality; that's why Objectivists have little to say about things like idealism.
Philosophy, according to Objectivism, is supposed to be a tool that you can use to understand the world and live in it.
Politics as a branch of philosophy is practical to the extent that it deals with creating and maintaining a civilization fit to live in, but there are plenty of other practical concerns that Objectivism helps with that have nothing to do with politics.
This is why, as far as I remember, the heroes and heroines in Rand's fiction (such as John Galt, Hank Rearden, Dagny Taggart, Howard Roark, etc.) were always concerned with doing real physical things instead of just sitting around contemplating ideas.

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.)

I never knew that a one-person invasion would be sufficient to dispense with immigration.

Yes, we objectively have a border crisis. So does Europe.
Ours is of course our own fault: first, we shouldn't be giving welfare to illegal immigrants. Second, we should be enforcing the laws, including in the cities, and not, e.g., allowing people to shoplift "as long as it's less than $900." These two policies alone attract the wrong sort of people.
Third, we do need adequate border police as well. What we are facing is an invasion, and the only reason the invaders aren't armed is because they don't need to be.
Fourth, however, legal immigration is absurdly difficult because of the bureaucracy, and that needs to be corrected, because discouraging legal immigration (and legal employment and trade, etc.) encourages illegal immigration (and employment and trade, etc.), and this creates organized crime in much the same way that alcohol prohibition did. (When you're engaging in illegal activity, you can't call the cops, so you call the mafia instead; they play the role of "cops" and "judges" between people engaging in the illegal activity -- but disputes become a matter of "might makes right" and there's no rule of law. Unfortunately the present régime seems to be supporting the organized crime rather than supporting the repeal of the Prohibition, but that is just another example of how the Left would rather use force than reason. The Left is much like a mafia, themselves.)
There are some people who think that culture has to be enforced and that the government should enforce it. Such a belief amounts to using "culture" as a license to initiate force. It should be noted not only that we don't have the "separation of state and culture" that we should have, but that the immigrants typically don't have it either, and so they will want to enforce their culture, and currently there is no principled opposition to this, there is only "might makes right," or, our culture versus their culture. The invasion of a hostile culture is much more of a problem in Europe than in the US (because in Europe the invaders are more hostile, bringing Islam and the desire for an Islamic state), but it is a problem even in the US -- and it's easy to see again why the Left aligns with it, because they want to annihilate the good parts of Western culture, and immigrants who seek to enforce their own culture give the Left another way to do that.
The correct solution, however, is not to "enforce our culture, or let them enforce theirs." We need a proper separation of state and culture (as part of a rights-respecting government), which means no enforcement, either public or private, of any culture at all, which means that peaceful immigrants could live here, but invaders could not hope to colonize our country by force. If we did have such a separation, the good parts of Western culture would survive, because they are aligned with reality itself and do not need enforcement. The separation, like any protection of rights, would not properly be subject to vote, but a government would still have to take care that it does not have so many immigrants that they become able to overthrow it completely (or infiltrate and subvert it). It would make sense to require that immigrants seeking citizenship support the separation of state and culture, to the extent such a requirement is even possible, but such a requirement would only make sense if we supported it ourselves.

It should also be emphasized that the political Left wrongly conflates the two; i.e., they hold that your race determines your ideas (including religion), or perhaps that your race ought to determine your ideas, which is to say, if you don't share the ideas of your race then you're a traitor to your race, or, to put it another way, "if you don't vote for Biden, you ain't Black."
This is the kind of thinking that makes things like genocide -- killing people solely because of their race -- seem necessary. If ideas are determined by race, then the only way to kill an idea is to wipe out the race that it belongs to. This can also be played the other way, and used to say that, since committing genocide is immoral, the only thing you can do if people are ideologically motivated to kill you, is to accept it, since their ideology is a product of their race and rejecting it would supposedly require committing genocide, and morally (according to this theory) it's better to be a victim of genocide than a perpetrator.
If you want to live, that choice requires proper self-defense, not acquiescence to one's own murder. So it's important to keep race and ideas separate. It's not race but ideas (including religious ideas) that cause people to want to kill each other. So sometimes the ideas need to be changed or eliminated, and if people can't be talked out of those ideas, they will act on them, and then force may be necessary in self-defense -- but a race as such is never a threat to anybody.
People whose ideas motivate them to kill large numbers of others tend to form or find governments that either look the other way, or actively assist them in killing. A government that does either is committing an act of war. It is proper for another government to recognize it as such, in self-defense and the defense of its people.

It should also be emphasized that the political Left wrongly conflates the two; i.e., they hold that your race determines your ideas (including religion), or perhaps that your race ought to determine your ideas, which is to say, if you don't share the ideas of your race then you're a traitor to your race, or, to put it another way, "if you don't vote for Biden, you ain't Black."
This is the kind of thinking that makes things like genocide -- killing people solely because of their race -- seem necessary. If ideas are determined by race, then the only way to kill an idea is to wipe out the race that it belongs to. This can also be played the other way, and used to say that, since committing genocide is immoral, the only thing you can do if people are ideologically motivated to kill you, is to accept it, since their ideology is a product of their race and rejecting it would supposedly require committing genocide, and morally (according to this theory) it's better to be a victim of genocide than a perpetrator.
If you want to live, that choice requires proper self-defense, not acquiescence to one's own murder. So it's important to keep race and ideas separate. It's not race but ideas (including religious ideas) that cause people to want to kill each other. So sometimes the ideas need to be changed or eliminated, and if people can't be talked out of those ideas, they will act on them, and then force may be necessary in self-defense -- but a race as such is never a threat to anybody.
People whose ideas motivate them to kill large numbers of others tend to form or find governments that either look the other way, or actively assist them in killing. A government that does either is committing an act of war. It is proper for another government to recognize it as such, in self-defense and the defense of its people.

A separation of religion and state, and a requirement that any laws that exist have to be justified based on objective reality and reason and nothing else.

This point of view doesn't come out of the New Testament; it comes out of the Enlightenment.
My understanding is that the first Puritan colonists almost died when they tried to take religion seriously, and only found success when they discovered productive work, an idea which developed into the "Protestant work ethic."
John Locke and some other Enlightenment philosophers thought that reasoning, based on reality, would ultimately lead to God -- to their conception of God. They argued that, if God made reality, to study reality was to study God. So they thought that if things could be derived from reason and reality, that was the same as if they came from God, and they thought of individual rights that way (as coming from God because they come from reality and the conditions necessary for human survival). They had a lot of confidence in the idea that they could have both reason and religion, but it turned out to be wrong, making a choice necessary.
There are still a great many Christians, especially in America, who discard logical consistency out of a desire to have it both ways. There are others who have decided that reason is error-prone, that reality is imperfect, and that both are corrupted by the Devil, so they side with religion (and the Bible) against reality. (Besides, if you can find out about God directly from reality, then "mistakes" in the Bible become evident, and the Bible itself becomes unnecessary, along with Christianity, and many Christians find that unacceptable. They'd rather say it's reality which is "mistaken.")
Sometimes I think there are two distinct interpretations of Christianity. One says that "Jesus sacrificed himself so you don't have to," that it was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the other says, "Jesus sacrificed himself as an example, so you should sacrifice yourself, too." I suspect John Locke (and the whole American system, which is largely based on his thought) would have aligned more with the former than the latter, but the debate seems to rage on to this day. (Or maybe it doesn't; it looks like the "example" side has been mostly winning.)

This point of view doesn't come out of the New Testament; it comes out of the Enlightenment.
My understanding is that the first Puritan colonists almost died when they tried to take religion seriously, and only found success when they discovered productive work, an idea which developed into the "Protestant work ethic."
John Locke and some other Enlightenment philosophers thought that reasoning, based on reality, would ultimately lead to God -- to their conception of God. They argued that, if God made reality, to study reality was to study God. So they thought that if things could be derived from reason and reality, that was the same as if they came from God, and they thought of individual rights that way (as coming from God because they come from reality and the conditions necessary for human survival). They had a lot of confidence in the idea that they could have both reason and religion, but it turned out to be wrong, making a choice necessary.
There are still a great many Christians, especially in America, who discard logical consistency out of a desire to have it both ways. There are others who have decided that reason is error-prone, that reality is imperfect, and that both are corrupted by the Devil, so they side with religion (and the Bible) against reality. (Besides, if you can find out about God directly from reality, then "mistakes" in the Bible become evident, and the Bible itself becomes unnecessary, along with Christianity, and many Christians find that unacceptable. They'd rather say it's reality which is "mistaken.")
Sometimes I think there are two distinct interpretations of Christianity. One says that "Jesus sacrificed himself so you don't have to," that it was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the other says, "Jesus sacrificed himself as an example, so you should sacrifice yourself, too." I suspect John Locke (and the whole American system, which is largely based on his thought) would have aligned more with the former than the latter, but the debate seems to rage on to this day. (Or maybe it doesn't; it looks like the "example" side has been mostly winning.)

Knowledge is hierarchical: you have to crawl before you can walk, algebra comes before calculus, and you can't invent the transistor until after you have discovered electricity.
The hierarchical nature of knowledge would also affect philosophy. Sometimes philosophers have to learn from their predecessors, including from the mistakes of their predecessors.
Because the human lifespan is limited and the amount of thinking a human can do is limited, there is a limit to how far one human can go intellectually. It's easier to reach any point if, due to the work of previous intellectuals, you get to start out halfway there. (You still have to verify their work, but that is much easier than having to invent it from scratch.)
Environment and society also make a difference; someone who comes up with a new idea will fare better in a free society than in a dictatorship, for example.

Is this language acceptable in this forum? @dream_weaver

The metaphysical status of consciousness is that it is an axiom -- it must be used and asserted even in any attempt to deny it.
The existence of consciousness is known to be conditional; determining exactly what the conditions are, and why, is a task for science.

"Judeo-Christianity" doesn't root itself in reality, it roots itself in divine revelation. It's essentially believing that abstractions come from God, that God handed the correct abstractions to Adam and Eve, and that those ideas have been passed down through the generations ever since.
Maybe long ago there were a bunch of elite high priests who thought that if they passed off their rational conclusions as divine revelations, and encouraged the little people to obey them blindly without asking pesky questions, then everything would work better. (There are people in Washington DC who think that way today.) However, things do not work better that way: society fares better if everybody knows how to think, just like it fares better if everybody knows how to read. The high priests often end up not being any better than anybody else, and sometimes they are worse (because criminals are attracted to positions of power).
Divine revelation can succeed through plain Darwinian evolution: if your civilization's divinely revealed ideas just happen to be correct, your civilization will last longer, and be able to spread more, than if they are wrong. However, if you root your ideas in divine revelation, the correctness of those ideas cannot be checked and is just a matter of chance, and bad or mixed ideas can be "enforced" just as easily as good ones. Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's right; the bad ideas may survive as parasites on the good ones, and very old civilizations can still have bad old ideas which cause unnecessary problems, but religious societies will refuse to change bad ideas, even if reality shows them as such, unless a divine revelation comes along that they will accept.
The idea of deliberately basing conclusions on reality has existed in the West in various forms ever since Aristotle. At some level people need it in order to survive, but sometimes it is counted on without ever being formulated as an idea at all. (I suppose in that case it is not deliberate...) When it is formulated, it is apparent that it is not really a religious idea, and in most periods of history it has been unpopular and derided, especially as a means of working out highly abstract ideas (which are the most important). The most common objection seems to be that people are too stupid to figure out reality on their own and therefore should give up the attempt and trust the high priests.
This is where Objectivism is radical: it takes the idea of deliberately basing conclusions on reality to its logical conclusion.

Welcome back!

You misunderstand my goal with these proposals. You think I'm suggesting that these actions will lead to peace between Israel and all Muslims.
I am most definitely not. I think the notion is absurd beyond belief. Anyone who talks about Israel achieving permanent peace with "the Palestinians", or any other Muslim population, is hopelessly deluded, and has not clue at all what the ideology driving entities like Hamas, Hezbollah, Isis, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, or Iran, is.
If you really are suggesting that the goal here is peace, I can't imagine that you ever even thought to consider the nature of totalitarian ideologies.
My proposals aren't meant to achieve peace and harmony. They're meant to achieve the defeat of Iran backed Islamist forces in Gaza, and replace them with whatever non-Islamist entity happens to be most convenient. Anything that doesn't have the same totalitarian ideology as Hamas. Fatah, for instance, will work fine. So will some kind of proxy authority controlled by Egypt and the CIA. Doesn't matter.
Creating an environment, in the Middle East, which would allow Israel to exist in peace with its neighbors, HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ISRAEL. It's an internal issue, in the Muslim world. There is a long term conflict going on, within the Muslim world itself, between Islamists and everyone else. The existence of that conflict, or the existence of Islamists, isn't caused by Israel. That's a silly notion. Why the hell would Israel cause Islamists to exist in central Africa? In Indonesia? Pakistan? Afghanistan? Turkey? Iran? Chechnya? You think Israel caused the Islamic Revolution in Iran, or the rise of the Taliban? Or Ergogan getting elected in Turkey?
Israel can't solve the Muslim world's internal problem, and it would be foolish of them to try. Their goal isn't peace, it's to live in relative security, while surrounded by a Muslim world which is in a state of massive internal conflict. A Muslim world that isn't peaceful, and will not be peaceful, for many decades to come.
None of the peace agreements Israel has are permanent. Israel doesn't have peace agreements with neighboring nations. It has peace agreements with neighboring regimes. Those regimes are temporary. The regime in Egypt can fall, the regime in Jordan can fall, etc. Even Turkey, which used to be best pals with Israel, fell to a semi-Islamist regime. The notion that the same thing can't happen in Jordan, or that things in Turkey can't get much worse, is wishful thinking.
There is nothing Israel can do to stop any of that. Israel can only prepare, and be willing to act swiftly and decisively when (not if) it happens. Conversely, of course, a reasonable regime (like Egypt's), can be installed in Gaza. Then, Israel can enjoy temporary peace with Gaza, just as it enjoys temporary peace with Egypt and Jordan.
That's the goal. Not this nonsensical "permanent peace" libertarian and liberal types like you go on about. You have no sense of history. No sense of what ideology is, and how it drives nations. This "tit for tat" view of conflict libertarians and liberals have, which thinks these totalitarian regimes and terror groups are a "reaction" to some kind of external aggression, is absurd. They're a consequence of internal failures. The Muslim world birthed a totalitarian ideology because it's rotten inside. Hamas is just the puss ball you see on the surface of the skin. The source of the puss is an infection deep within Islam. An overall rot, that produces similar puss balls all over the Muslim world. Boko Haram, Taliban, Iran's regime, Erdogan, etc.
None of it has anything to do with Israel ... which, btw, is in no way driven by totalitarian ideology. There's nothing totalitarian about "Zionism". Zionism is nationalistic the same way every nation is nationalistic. That's the other thing this thread is yet to pick up on: the massive difference between totalitarian ideologies like Marxism, Nazism and Islamism, and nationalism (the political idea which is at the core of the post 19th century nation state).
 

When you imply that someone is a conspiracy theorist, that is a statement about the person rather than the argument they are making.
Saying that someone "must be irrational if they support X, Y, or Z" can be an argument from intimidation, like "Oh, you can't claim to be an Objectivist if you believe X, Y, or Z, because then you'd be irrational, and Objectivists have to be rational." It's an appeal to Objectivist peer pressure, especially trying to say that "this is supposed to be an Objectivist board so only Objectivist points of view should be able to be posted here," etc.
And both are a form of psychologizing -- attacking a statement by going into the mental state of the person making it, instead of attacking it by comparing it to reality.
If you want to show that some statement X is mistaken, then you have to show why without reference to the person making the statement.
If you want to show that a statement is arbitrary then you need to show that no evidence, of any kind, could establish its truth or falsehood -- that it is "detached from reality" in the specific sense that reality wouldn't make any difference to it.
(It's possible for something to be arbitrary "in practice" and to prove this by using other facts about the world to establish that it is arbitrary; it is valid, for example, to say that a statement is arbitrary because the current state of technology is such that nobody could know today whether it is true or false -- even if in principle it might become known someday. This is how you deal with the claim of the teapot orbiting Venus.)
Finally, it's not always possible to prove something definitively on any sort of forum. This is why civilization as such sometimes requires people to agree to disagree. It is also one of the reasons why freedom is important. There can be a difference between what you know and what you can prove to others.

This is nothing but an ad hominem and an argument from intimidation.
The whole debate is about which facts to use, because if someone can cause facts to be discarded, or lies to be treated as facts, they can rig the argument to produce any result they want, even without changing the principles.
The "mainstream Western media" has learned that they can get perquisites by going along with the party line; the government, which makes news whenever it changes its policies, can reward obedient reporters by giving them scoops. This has been true for a long time; Rush Limbaugh's radio show cited example after example after example (of reporters uncritically repeating what they were told by leftist politicians). I see no evidence that this situation has changed, and much evidence that it has gotten worse. I also see no evidence that the situation is any different with the Ukraine issue than any other (such as gun control). That the media lies is not a "conspiracy theory." It is very real, and has been going on for decades.
I do not agree with @whYNOT about everything, but I very much disagree with the notion of censoring or canceling everything and everybody that "goes against the mainstream." Ayn Rand also went against the mainstream, and if she were to have written her novels in today's environment, no one would know about her.

When you imply that someone is a conspiracy theorist, that is a statement about the person rather than the argument they are making.
Saying that someone "must be irrational if they support X, Y, or Z" can be an argument from intimidation, like "Oh, you can't claim to be an Objectivist if you believe X, Y, or Z, because then you'd be irrational, and Objectivists have to be rational." It's an appeal to Objectivist peer pressure, especially trying to say that "this is supposed to be an Objectivist board so only Objectivist points of view should be able to be posted here," etc.
And both are a form of psychologizing -- attacking a statement by going into the mental state of the person making it, instead of attacking it by comparing it to reality.
If you want to show that some statement X is mistaken, then you have to show why without reference to the person making the statement.
If you want to show that a statement is arbitrary then you need to show that no evidence, of any kind, could establish its truth or falsehood -- that it is "detached from reality" in the specific sense that reality wouldn't make any difference to it.
(It's possible for something to be arbitrary "in practice" and to prove this by using other facts about the world to establish that it is arbitrary; it is valid, for example, to say that a statement is arbitrary because the current state of technology is such that nobody could know today whether it is true or false -- even if in principle it might become known someday. This is how you deal with the claim of the teapot orbiting Venus.)
Finally, it's not always possible to prove something definitively on any sort of forum. This is why civilization as such sometimes requires people to agree to disagree. It is also one of the reasons why freedom is important. There can be a difference between what you know and what you can prove to others.