dream_weaver

You're moving goalposts now. Without evidence, you accused me of trying to "divert attention" from "Republican hypocrisy" through rationalization (where do I mention a political party anywhere?). You obviously don't know what the word means because I don't rationalize the court decision anywhere (in fact, I disagree with it). When I pointed out I have no connection to the GOP or motive to "spin" for them, you shifted to an argument of irrationality, which was not the accusation - spinning for a political party was.

I've noticed a pattern of you jumping to extreme conclusions and being combative towards others just for the sake of being contrarian. Some would call this trolling, but I think it's just a compulsive need for you to prove how much purer and smarter you are than everyone else, i.e., the worst tendencies of objectivism.

As for your inane contention that my piece is "irrational" because there is "no connection" between religious liberties (the subject of the ruling) and economic liberties, I am making a comparison between the two to draw a contrast. Obviously there is *some* connection between the two because they are both types of liberties - that's a connection. Social and economic positions are often compared and contrasted and discussed together in these political dialogues. There is nothing "irrational" about comparing two separate but related concepts, and you shouldn't read in a sinister partisan motive where there is none.

On the upside, you probably recognize that the use or misuse of your cognitive faculty, not your namesake, determines your choice of values, which determine your emotions and your character, and in this sense, you are a being of self-made soul.

You think there is a way out, yet you offer the same old tired apologetics for the state.  Are you sure you did not typo and actually meant to type "I don't think there is a way out, though."?
 
I will be one of the "One in 5" by 2030. If you (and a host of others) do not discover the morality proper to man by that time, you will be asking yourself if the young will continue to allow themselves to be pressured into paying for your social 'security' and 'affordable' health care. You are against taxation, but since it is the only way a monetary economy 'works', then Capitalism and Austrian Economics must simply be pie-in-the-sky, wishful, idealism. After all, people are dependent on money (not their minds) in order to survive.
 
For cryin' out loud, you make it sound as if 95% of Americans will be dead or broke at age 65. On the other hand, like aleph_1, if you and your ilk are going to force me to take Medicare when I'm 65, it should not be too difficult to recoup what I've already paid into it over the years, especially if I have got an additional 40+ hours a week to devote to it.

Then talk your local community or school library into getting them -- or any other Objectivist book or tape you would like to listen to or read.

Your tax (or tuition) dollars at work!

It is very important to realize that the action of filing for or declaring a copyright or a patent is NOT a declaration that one cannot think about the ideas behind the products nor can prevent you from you yourself making an improvement on the application of the ideas behind the product. There are absolutely no restrictions of thinking or what you do with ideas in your own mind. The restriction is strictly on the fact that the innovator was the one who brought the idea to physical fruition, made a product based upon an idea, which would not exist without him doing so, and he retains the rights to the **product** not the idea behind it. Henry Food cannot prevent you from thinking about the Model T; he cannot prevent you from coming up with a different type of automobile; he cannot prevent you from using mass production techniques. What he can prevent you from doing is making unauthorized copies of his product because by declaring and receiving a patent for the Model T, he is placing a restriction on what you can do with his product -- namely that you cannot reproduce it without his permission, and by buying a Model T you, at least implicitly, agree to those terms and conditions.
 
Likewise with buying a movie or going to a movie theater to watch a movie. The creator of that movie has placed a restriction on you watching that movie, and the restriction is that you cannot copy it or distribute it without his permission. This is the root of having a copyright.
 
By declaring that all of my work is copyrighted, I am placing a restriction on what you can do with my essays. You are quite free to read them insofar as I have made them available to you at no charge now (though maybe charging for longer essays in the future), and the only restriction I make by declaring a copyright is that you do not have my permission to distribute them without my permission. I cannot prevent you from thinking through the issues. I cannot prevent you from understanding the ideas behind intellectual property rights. I cannot prevent you from writing your own essay on the topic, pro or con. I cannot prevent you from having an idea in any way whatsoever. What I can prevent you from doing is taking my essay without my permission and putting it somewhere I would rather it not be. That is my right by creating those essays that go from my mind to a blank sheet of paper (digital or otherwise).

A table is there.  If I put something on it it will hold it.  The fact it was built or what it looks like is a random attribute. 
 
Gravity is a universal law, random speeds based on mass non-withstanding.  It is a law in fact that comes with random attributes that can be studied like anthing else. 
 
Post Modernism is an excuse to ignore facts of reality like the table is really there and if I let go of a ball it will drop which can be understoood only if you know absolutes like the Law of Non-Contradiction.  It's characteristics like mass can only be understood if you have a system of knowledge based on A is A - An absolute. 
 
Don't make the mistake of listening to long constructs philosophers and scientists build on randomn attributes to ignore the elephant in the room.  If nothing was absolute then we would understand nothing, the universe would be unintelligible since we could identify nothing, and we would not know there are no absulutes since that requires an abssolute to think by to utter the statement which is also an absolute.  
 
Knowledge of a non-absolute is a contradiction in terms, just like a "Deterministic Philosophy".  Absolutes is a prerequisite of knowledge.  You need the first to get the second. 

One can appreciate Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's opening paragraph on Postmodernism:
That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.
 
While apparently indefinable, it is not indescribable. For those having no truck with the reaffirmation through denial, a friend of Miss Rand once said:
that today's attitude, paraphrasing the Bible, is; "Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I'm doing - and please don't tell me."
 
The law of causality guaranties the outcome of the rebellion against identity. In the meantime, postmodernism just provides another way to separate those who know A is A, from some others that wish it were not so.

One can appreciate Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's opening paragraph on Postmodernism:
That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.
 
While apparently indefinable, it is not indescribable. For those having no truck with the reaffirmation through denial, a friend of Miss Rand once said:
that today's attitude, paraphrasing the Bible, is; "Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I'm doing - and please don't tell me."
 
The law of causality guaranties the outcome of the rebellion against identity. In the meantime, postmodernism just provides another way to separate those who know A is A, from some others that wish it were not so.

One can appreciate Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's opening paragraph on Postmodernism:
That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.
 
While apparently indefinable, it is not indescribable. For those having no truck with the reaffirmation through denial, a friend of Miss Rand once said:
that today's attitude, paraphrasing the Bible, is; "Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I'm doing - and please don't tell me."
 
The law of causality guaranties the outcome of the rebellion against identity. In the meantime, postmodernism just provides another way to separate those who know A is A, from some others that wish it were not so.

One can appreciate Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's opening paragraph on Postmodernism:
That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.
 
While apparently indefinable, it is not indescribable. For those having no truck with the reaffirmation through denial, a friend of Miss Rand once said:
that today's attitude, paraphrasing the Bible, is; "Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I'm doing - and please don't tell me."
 
The law of causality guaranties the outcome of the rebellion against identity. In the meantime, postmodernism just provides another way to separate those who know A is A, from some others that wish it were not so.

One can appreciate Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's opening paragraph on Postmodernism:
That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.
 
While apparently indefinable, it is not indescribable. For those having no truck with the reaffirmation through denial, a friend of Miss Rand once said:
that today's attitude, paraphrasing the Bible, is; "Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I'm doing - and please don't tell me."
 
The law of causality guaranties the outcome of the rebellion against identity. In the meantime, postmodernism just provides another way to separate those who know A is A, from some others that wish it were not so.

Referencing the following from ITOE:
(As far as can be ascertained, the perceptual level of a child's awareness is similar to the awareness of the higher animals: the higher animals are able to perceive entities, motions, attributes, and certain numbers of entities. But what an animal cannot perform is the process of abstraction—of mentally separating attributes, motions or numbers from entities. It has been said that an animal can perceive two oranges or two potatoes, but cannot grasp the concept "two.")
 
It is this distinction I'm trying to separate out of this intelligence equation. Can rationality exist without conceptualization?
 
Gathering sticks to serve as kindling, learning to strike a match (not to manufacture one), place a marshmallow on stick (again, not to fabricate one) differs in what crucial ways from the physical activity of riding a bike (again, not having developed the capability of producing one, much less mass producing them) or orienting a stick with a marshmallow in a proper proximity to a flame?
 
Edited: Added.

In seeking to compare methods of discovery to evaluate intelligence, to contrast man, the rational animal, with animal, sans-rational, how does one filter rationality from the mix to ensure an accurate ordinal assessment of dumbness, or more positively, intelligence, and simultaneously apply it across the broad all-inclusive animal kingdom?
 
Peikoff, in one of his lectures, discussed the borderline case. Loosely paraphrasing, it is not accomplished by trying to contrast the dumbest college freshman against the brightest primate. First, the normative standard needs to be isolated, at which point you return to the borderline case and apply the principle abstracted to the specific particulars involved.
 
Edited: Would this be considered a case of playing devil's advocate with Devil's Advocate?

Away From Show of Diplomacy in Geneva, Putin Puts On a Show of His Own
 
. . . On the question of Ukraine, Mr. Putin repeated his assertions that Russia feels an obligation to protect ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, where they are a large minority of the population. “We must do everything to help these people to protect their rights and independently determine their own destiny,” he said.
 
“The question is to ensure the rights and interests of the Russian southeast,” he added. “It’s New Russia. Kharkiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, Odessa were not part of Ukraine in czarist times, they were transferred in 1920. Why? God knows. Then for various reasons these areas were gone, and the people stayed there. We need to encourage them to find a solution.”
 
Rights here, cannot be anything like what is embodied in the Cicero-Locke-Paine tradition.
As to only God knowing why, according to Wikipedia on Ukraine,
 
When World War I ended, several empires collapsed; among them were the Russian and Austrian empires. The Russian Revolution of 1917 ensued, and a Ukrainian national movement for self-determination reemerged, with heavy Communist/Socialist influence. During 1917–20, several separate Ukrainian states briefly emerged: the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Hetmanate, the Directorate and the pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (or Soviet Ukraine) successively established territories in the former Russian Empire; while the West Ukrainian People's Republic and the Hutsul Republic emerged briefly in the former Austro-Hungarian territory. This led to civil war, and an anarchist movement called the Black Army led by Nestor Makhno, developed in Southern Ukraine during that war.
 
However, Poland defeated Western Ukraine in the Polish-Ukrainian War, but failed against the Bolsheviks in an offensive against Kiev. According to the Peace of Riga concluded between the Soviets and Poland, western Ukraine was officially incorporated into Poland, which in turn recognised the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in March 1919. With establishment of the Soviet power in Ukraine, the country lost half of its territory: the eastern Galicia was given to Poland, Pripyat marshes region – to Belarus, half of Sloboda Ukraine and northern fringes of Severia were passed to Russia, while on the left bank of Dniester River was created Moldavian autonomy. Eventually, Ukraine became a founding member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Soviet Union in December 1922.
 
Even so, what was (and perhaps still is) the allure of Ukraine. Earlier in the article provides a plausible suggestion:
 
Ukraine has long been a global breadbasket due to its extensive, fertile farmlands. As of 2011, it was the world's third-largest grain exporter with that year's harvest being much larger than average. Ukraine is one of ten most attractive agricultural land acquisition regions. Additionally, the country has a well-developed manufacturing sector, particularly in aerospace and industrial equipment.
 
As to the mainstream media bringing forth the developments in the ongoing charade of: "We report (selective facts), you decide." leaving the organization of the relevant factors according to the appropriate governing principles as an ongoing work in progress.

The allegation of empty rhetoric from practitioner, none the less.
 
The point density inquiry probes into a more subtle equivocation error. When measuring anything, it is important to keep in mind what is being measured, and keep the unit in mind while determining the magnitude.
And this reference was much clearer to me than an assertion about Cantor's ideas regarding actual infinities shed on the topic.

I saw communism most clearly. This broadens the scope to include any unchecked government agency. Even when the checks have been made as explicit as humanly possible at the time, the myths are used to circumvent and even undermine the controls, even to the detriment of the greatest achievement of self-governance ever contrived.
 
 
Therein lies the rub. Morality requires rationality to be discovered. If a proper application of reason to the problem of survival is the good, an improper application of reason is its converse. Yet an improper application of reason is a contradiction in terms.

All creatures follow some method of survival, that's what it means to be alive. Mental representation probably rose from perception, in the sense it is a more complex and often a richer way to see the world in terms of information available. And of course, it's pretty easy to note that richer information gives survival advantage for food searching and navigation, not even a physical survival advantage from predators. A lot of study has been done on animal cognition, which easily demonstrates how mental calculations serve a significant survival value. At the same time, there's isn't a lot of methods they are able to use due to the limits of neurology and what their brain is able to calculate. Such limitations are how their methods of thought were discovered - it's easy enough to see them make certain errors all the time, so you create those scenarios to manipulate errors. One good book on this is Organization of Learning.

Human thinking ability is a further development of all that development, I'd argue it is an evolution of cognitive ability. I actually wouldn't say animals are irrational, just a-rational. Rational in my mind refers to the degree that humans have greater cognitive power, computational power, and a conceptual system of thought. But with greater computational power comes more ways to make an error. Furthermore, a conceptual system seems to depend on an active volitional process that is deliberative. That is, many ways of thinking in people requires concepts, so they have to create those concepts. Even people who argue for innate concepts wouldn't say calculus is an innate concept. Of course, as you well know, concepts may be made in such a way that they help nothing at all. Why though wouldn't these worse ways of thinking lead people to die off through evolution?

I suspect that rationality or cognitive ability is less related to reproduction as cognitive ability grows. Being able to do calculus or geometry may help with understanding the world, but not so much with having offspring. In a sense, you can get so complex that being rational or not is neglible to species survival. Then again, extreme irrationality leads to an "extinction" and mass death. See suicide cults as a good example. But irrationality to the degree of say, second-handedness, I'd say would barely affect human reproduction. Bad thinking would not help survival, but good thinking must be taught, and accordingly, bad thinking can be taught at any point in history.

Very very true; I'm trying! Mammon: I know what you mean about chipping away at hope...I guess the only thing to do is keep putting yourself in environments where you can meet interesting, thoughtful people who are excited about life and genuinely have something to offer. Anything less is selling yourself short.

Just reading this thread makes me feel a little better that I'm not the only one out there who thinks this way.

Not me. Its just reason #3256 why I stopped consuming alcohol many years ago. Don't let their foolish pursuits taint your rational pursuits.

With my son heading off to college in less than a month, I'm think that honesty and example setting (on both parents part) will mean he won't be one of the guys in some other picture like this next month, next year, etc.

Assuming they did know about this before hiring him, then yes, bad PR. Where does the bad PR come from? Originally, a source that shouldn't even exist in the first place (campaign finance government crap) and (I don't know the details) maybe a group that sought information from that source (also bad of those people). However, the information has spread to people well down the line who had nothing to do with that, lots of them. Those are the people that I'd bet make up the extreme majority of the people that were displeased with Mozilla, the ones that this was bad PR to that Mozilla responded to. The cat at this point is not only out of the bag, it's miles away from the bag. I don't see how keeping a new CEO that has upset a lot of one's customers, customers who by far and large did nothing wrong in how they came about the info that upset them, is standing up for privacy or against those who violate privacy.  Seriously, if you do see how, please explain. I really was asking a question in my previous post, not merely making a "nuh-uh" statement with a question mark. Also, side note, I highly suspect people that use Mozilla's products and contribute to them financially have a different ratio on political positions than the general population with gay marriage being heavily supported among them.
 
Interestingly though, when I looked on the Mozilla wikipedia page to see if I could find more info, I came across something about that guy not being newly hired - he was CTO and they promoted him. I thought from what I'd heard that he wasn't previously involved with Mozilla. Hmm. What kind of additional powers does a CEO have that a CTO doesn't? I know there are ones, I just don't know exactly what they are. Or is it maybe having him as representative of the whole company that is what is found particularly unsavory as opposed to when he was the CTO?

Certainly!
 
Whenever someone says "we know that we can know nothing" it can't be true, because if it were then they could never make that statement.  But even when someone says "I can know nothing about your mental content" it's actually the same thing, because the very act of a speaking requires knowledge about your partners' mental content (even writing forces you to guess at what your audience would understand); even though the statement doesn't openly include itself it still implies the Liar's Paradox.
The Liar's Paradox (this statement is a lie) is actually what the vast majority of skepticist arguments boil down to.  David Hume, for example, went to great lengths to say that there was something wrong with induction- and he reached this conclusion inductively.
Did Hume enumerate every single instance of inductive reasoning that could ever be attempted?  No; he showed that induction was invalid yesterday (since yesterday proves nothing about tomorrow) and nobody asked whether induction would be valid tomorrow.
 
So almost all skepticist arguments boil down to "this statement is a lie", except that in most cases, part of the proposition is never mentioned explicitly; it's assumed in their reasoning (as in Hume's inductive "problem of induction").  Because if anyone accepted what Hume, Kant or the Wachowski Brothers were selling and actually applied it to their own cognition, there would not be very many things they could conclude from anything at all.
Which is why almost all skeptical arguments are also stolen concepts.
 
So the upshot of it is, familiarizing yourself with the fallacy of the stolen concept is the silver bullet of skepticism because once you learn how to spot it in any given situation, you'll never have to wonder about the Matrix again.

New Buddha, your question is reversed. The questions that serves as a better basis here are; "What is it that make rationality possible in the first place?" Why did rationality develop? What neurological component allows human being to be uniquely rational? Why do we consider the behavior of other animals to be 'instinctual?' Is rationality an offshoot of volition? Is volition only made understood by the discovery discovered by the recognition that that error is possible?
 
Edited: previous, updated.

1.) It is commonly accepted that Cantor proved there are many actual infinities.  Knowledge, however, is not something acquired by how commonly accepted it is, i.e., that the earth is flat.
 
2.) The universe, or existence, is not in time, rather time is in the universe. It was Parmenides who correctly identified the philosophic position with "What is, is." and the correct converse of "What is not, is not."  While there are no regions of non-existence within existence, the term space is a relational notion, so if you are referring to no "space" in the sense of a tangible concrete, it would fit.
 
For your last two assertions, the formal logic derived from Aristotle, later, its essence put into the short tautology of "A is A" is not so much to do with the understanding of science per se, but to serve as an epistemological framework to guide one's self if proper thinking leading to knowledge is the desired goal.

Regarding yesterday's post (and my comment that my wife had gotten a decent education in public schools), a reader noted the following:


... One of the saving graces of American public education that's being progressively destroyed pretty much on principle ever since the Department of Education was created is that it used to be heavily decentralized, which allowed a great deal of independence in teachers to flourish. The principal in New Zealand I mentioned, who threw out a silly rule book so his students could play during recess, would, I am sure, have the book thrown at him here. But in case anyone needed examples of this problem, A. Barton Hinkle recently wrote a piece replete with them. (He starts with a student facing disciplinary action for possession of a dangerous object. Said student was a girl who stopped another from "cutting" herself -- and then discarded the razor to avoid falling afoul of her school's mindless "zero tolerance" policy on dangerous objects.) Hinkle notes of such incidents and the fact that schools have been "rethinking" such policies for well over a decade:


It's great that a school district here and there has second thoughts about first-strike policies. But that doesn't solve the broader problem, which is rooted in a bureaucratic compliance mentality. Just ask Chaz Seale, a Texas 17-year-old who accidentally shoved a Coors into his brown-bag lunch instead of a soda. When he realized his mistake he gave the unopened beer to a teacher. The teacher told the principal, and the principal suspended Seale for three days and sentenced him to two months at an alternative school. So, in our public schools, we're increasingly not just teaching our kids that the real world is dangerous, but acclimating them to one that actually is: one in which mindless bureaucrats wield unchecked power over them. Worrisome to me is the fact that I wasn't particularly looking for an article like Hinkle's, any more than I was the one I discussed yesterday.

-- CAV

Link to Original

I don't see that as trouble. It's evidence that Peikoff remains willing to correct his conclusions in light of better evidence. Good for him.

This whole issue boils down to you accepting the premise that you can protect rights by violating rights. You've been defeated by the oldest method of the statist: create a problem --> convince people to fear the problem more than they should ---> convince people to sanction more self-victimization.