dream_weaver

The balif cries, "All rise,"

The Honorable Reader enters.

The balif announces, "The supreme mental court of this human consciousness is now in session. The Honorable Judge Reader presiding."

"You may be seated."

The balif cites, "Docket number 1074, the case of Atlas Shrugged: morality of altruism vs. morality of egoism."

"Is the prosecution ready?"

"I am, your Honor", Miss Rand replies.

"Is the defense ready?"

"I am, you Honor", Miss Rand replies.

"You may proceed."

That could make for a rather novel approach.

Is that so? Well then, what does the competition have to say about this? What is the Post-Modernist, Marxist, Existentialist or Analytic-Linguistic position on cardinal infinities?
Rhetorical question. They have nothing to say about it either because it is not a philosophical question.

As far as the question of finding what the idea of infinity reduces to, I think that has already been answered. Infinity reduces to the open-ended nature of concepts.

It is important to not conflate the two concepts of "material" and "physical". Material connotes tangible, and potentially an independently existing entity even for parts of a greater whole if a part was separated. Physical means causal, and includes in its referents attributes that are not separable and that can never exist independently.

Thoughts are physical because they are attributes of the tangible existent which is the brain and are both cause and caused; thoughts are not material because they are attributes that cannot exist independently or even isolated as parts.

The distinction between part and attribute is made by Ayn Rand in ITOE 2nd ed., in one of the dialogues appended to the book.

No. It does matter. Objectivists don't agree that murder and theft are morally wrong on the basis of face, Christians who attribute those moral laws to God do. Ayn Rand was a great mind, but there was nothing divine about her. We agree with Objectivism, not because of Ayn Rand, but because of the reasoning behind her ideas.

Every post you've made in any of these inter-connecting threads is based on the premise that it is immoral to break the bonds that tie the abuser and the abused; that one adversary doesn't have the right to withdrawl from the other, but instead must continue taking abuse in order to teach the other why abuse is wrong. Especially if breaking those bonds would cause harm to the abuser.

Consider that a kid at school takes my lunch money every day. According to you, I would not only have to continue to let him take it, but take the trouble to explain to him why it's wrong for him to take it -- the lesson being delivered, presumeably, through a bloody nose. Well look, it's not like my missing lunch money is breaking me; and I still continue to study and excel at my main goal, which is keeping up with my scholastics; and in fact when I leave school for the day I don't have him to worry about, and all in all life is pretty damn good. You would tell me: "Suck it up. You know how to live, he doesn't. Teach him, even as he pummels you."

You also teach me that I am in fact responsible for the consequences of his own actions. What happens if I leave that school, and without my lunch money he starves to death? Or is malnourished to the point that his success is impossible? You would say "He needed your lunch money and you knew it: you starved him." What if I went further, and rallied my classmates to oppose bullying? Or if I went further still, and built my own school where there would be no bullies allowed? Then you would say I was purging the world of bullies, that I was a murderer and responsible for all the things that the bullies ought to have known, even as I taught them and they rejected the lesson.

Again, shallow understanding. You conveniently left out the part where his disciples questioned him about it and he responded:
""If you stand by the side of men, and see it as men see it, it appears impossible; but stand by God's side, see it by His side, and all things, even the salvation of both rich and poor, becomes possible".

Jesus also states many times how difficult it is for anyone to get to Heaven, rich or poor: This translation from Aramaic to English:
"How narrow is the gate and strict the way that leads to life, and few are those who find it!"

It helps not to have just read only the most glib and common quotes.
Malachi also offers many justifications for prosperity ministry.

I'm not arguing for Christianity here. But what I am saying is that many Objectivists use arguments against Christianity that are just as misinformed and uneducated as the arguments people use against Objectivism.

edit typos

Once upon a time (1976 and 1990 going by the copyrights) Harry Binswanger wrote a PhD thesis and later a book entitled "The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts". The specific question you ask is well covered, along with others that you haven't thought of or written down yet (such as individual versus group survival).

Given the context of non-human organisms which are not volitional and thus genetically determined, quotes beginning on page 154 are as follows:




To emphasize a point here: the concept of survival must include genesis in order to be fully symmetrical to the perspective of reproduction that includes survival.

Binswanger goes on also to emphasize this point:




In the causal sequence ... → eggN → henN → eggN+1 → henN+1→ egN+2 ... (setting aside the rooster's role) past acts of reproduction in the ancestral line of hens have survival value to the present henN, and the reproductive acts of henN are caused by the same genes that caused mating (or "reproductive fitness" more generally) in prior hens. Reproductive fitness up to eggN is included in survival value to henN, and survival value to henN is included in reproductive fitness for eggN+1.

Thats enough for now.

Intellectual Ammo, let me ask you a question.

If I decide that I either can't or don't want to grow my own food and I seize you and force you to plant, sow and reap crops and raise livestock to feed me.
If you see a way to escape the bondage I have kept you in must you ignore the opportunity and instead try to debate me on the ethics of slavery? Give up your chance to escape to freedom to convince me to be more just?
And if you do escape from the slavery I have kept you in, and take all my other slaves with you, and I refuse to start trading value for value and I refuse to raise my crops myself are you then guilty of murder when I starve to death?

Could it be said you "purged" me?

Edit:typo

[since this isn't about the branches of Objectivism per se, I've put this post here in the "Critics of Objectivism" board, despite this not being a criticism of Objectivism. If the moderators have a better place for this, I'm more than happy to comply.]

by Roderick Fitts

Introduction and Key Points Concerning the "Open" and "Closed" Systems

It's been about a year since I first encountered the “Closed System vs. Open System” or “Leonard Peikoff vs. David Kelley” issue, and about 9 months since I sided with the closed system advocates (in my facebook note: Why I Support the Closed System).

I'd like to point out that I didn't completely understand the issue when I wrote that note, and I now regard my reasons given back then for siding with the “closed system” side as weak. To give examples, I had not yet grasped the relevant difference between philosophy and science to dispute David Kelley's claim about the need to revise and reformulate principles already accepted as “Objectivist,” and I lacked an understand of exactly why Objectivism was a proper noun, as I hadn't progressed sufficiently through the epistemology to know this.

After giving it a lot more thought, interacting with Ayn Rand Institute staff and affiliates, noticing the Objectivism-related material pouring from ARI members and supporters, and re-reading the papers central to the dispute, I can properly defend my stance as a “closed system” advocate. I'd especially like to thank Diana Hsieh for posting her thoughts about this dispute, including her disagreements concerning the “open system” view that Kelley and The Objectivist Center espouse.
(Comment: My interaction with the ARI has consisted of hosting speakers for the University of Michigan Students of Objectivism college lectures, taking courses at the Objectivist Academic Center, and most recently attending a summer conference about “Atlas Shrugged and the Moral Foundations of Capitalism.” While the issue of the “open/closed system” never arose in my dealings with ARI, my dealings with them helped in confirming that the accusations made about closed system advocates were strawmen and unjust.)

Now, I will name what I regard to be the key points of both the “closed” and “open” view, and afterward comment on four things:

(1) How the closed system is supported in academia, and why they're correct in upholding it.
(2) Kelley's view of using philosophic principles in essentially the same manner as scientific ones, and why he is mistaken.
(3) My reasons for characterizing the “open system” as I have here.
(4) Why the closed system is misunderstood and addressing several strawmen attributed to it.

Closed System:
1. Objectivism is the integrated whole of philosophic ideas, principles, and consequences (of said principles) expressed by Ayn Rand in published form, and material from others she agreed to include as part of Objectivism (e.g. Peikoff's lecture course “The Philosophy of Objectivism”) Due to the nature of integrated systems, any change of an element within Objectivism would have disastrous effects on the entire system, wrecking it.

2. New implications, applications, and integrations can always be discovered and learned by Objectivists, but these are to be considered separate from the actual philosophy as developed by Ayn Rand. One could say that some new work (e.g. one of Tara Smith's book on Rand's ethics) is “in the Objectivist tradition” or “Objectivist” in the broad sense that it is logically consistent with the philosophy, but is not an actual addition to the philosophy.

3. Objectivism is an abstract particular—a proper noun which refers ostensively to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Specifically, the set of philosophical abstractions, principles, and ideas espoused by her. As an abstract particular, it refers to the same mental content which all of us possess who know anything about Objectivism.
(Comment: To grasp how "Objectivism" is a proper noun, I suggest thinking more about the differences between concepts and proper nouns. For example, the concept “car” is an abstract particular it that it refers to the same mental contents in all of us who can identify cars; there doesn't exist a “meta-concept” of “car” which is formed by omitting the measurements of our concepts of “car.” Please see Diana Hsieh's interview with Axiomatic Magazine for more on this, which can be found on the Wayback Machine's archive: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ax...ex=3&art=4)

Open System:
1. Objectivism is, in effect, equivalent to: all true ideas and principles discovered in philosophy, and to be discovered in the future. Beyond the self-evidence of axioms, all ideas and principles are subject to revision, reformulation, and/or qualification (or maybe not; I'll get to this in a second).

(Comment: In a sense, not even the axioms are safe from revision, etc. because there exists specific reasons why we need axiomatic concepts, specific functions that they serve and that are not self-evident (see ItOE 2nd ed. ch. 6 and p. 260); more specifically, it's the function of axiomatic concepts as “underscorers of primary facts” which makes it epistemologically necessary to formulate axiomatic concepts into formal axioms—into a “base and a reminder.” (ItOE p. 59) )

2. There is no inherent need to integrate the principles which are, at any given moment, determined to be “Objectivist.” Under the “open system,” the principle that knowledge is contextual (and therefore calls for integration of one's new insights into one's knowledge) need not be heeded, as principles are always subject to later revision.

3. Objectivism is to reflect the epistemological approach taken in regards to science, where principles must constantly be tested and confirmed by new data, and reformed or outright changed when the data suggests such a policy.

4. Skepticism of the truth contained in principles is the consequence of this view. Because there is never a “full context” in which to ground a principle, one can always doubt that one even has a valid principle.

Academia and Closed Systems
In my understanding, philosophic systems (e.g. Aristotle's philosophy, Hume's philosophy) are closed systems in the same manner that I've indicated above, and this is how they are treated in academia. For instance, in my 402 course on Aristotle, the class wrote papers interpreting areas of Aristotle's thought; even if the papers stated ideas which were logically consistent to Aristotle's philosophy, they wouldn't have been considered additions to the actual philosophy. At best, they were “Aristotelian” or “related to the philosophy of Aristotle.”

This has generally been my experience as an undergrad philosophy student and reader of scholarly works: philosophies are specific sets of principles laid out by the philosophies' authors, and while new implications, applications, etc. can be drawn out by others, these do not become part of the respective philosophies. Contrary to Kelley's view from ch. 5 of "Truth and Toleration" (T&T), Peikoff's claims of philosophies being closed systems do have “precedent” and “foundation.” (p. 72; For the online text, see: http://www.objectivistcenter.org/cth--40-O...Toleration.aspx ) The "precedent" is the practice of scholars carefully separating the works of a philosophy's originator from the works of followers, which has gone on for centuries. The "foundation" is the cognitive need to separate Rand's philosophy from both future developments (e.g. “Neo-objectivism”) and from other distinctive philosophies (e.g. Pragmatism and Platonism), and more broadly the need to do this with every other philosophy.

(Comment: In my view, it is this cognitive need which leads to forming proper nouns for people's theories, philosophies, and other mental products; a similar case involves actual people, whereupon we need a shorthand to cognitively differentiate among the various people we encounter, a function served by proper nouns.)

Part 2 will cover Kelley's mistaken reasons for attributing the same methodology to philosophic principles that are (for the most part) appropriate for science.

Here's the rest of my paper:

Part 2: http://umso.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/close...ls-part-2-of-5/
Part 3: http://umso.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/close...ls-part-3-of-5/
Part 4: http://umso.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/close...ls-part-4-of-5/
Part 5: http://umso.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/close...ls-part-5-of-5/

Questions and comments appreciated.

If he had an unflawed specimen, then he would know that his thesis that "everyone is flawed" was incorrect, right?

Interesting article about a guy from MIT who created a robot that could do simple task, and did not cost a million dollars. Meet Baxter.



Regardless of all that happens in the world of politics, real progress continues.

The effects of moral law are most definitely physical as well as mental and emotional. I regard moral law as operating in exactly the same way as the law of gravity. Both are absolutely objective, and neither is the least bit affected by our emotions, thoughts, beliefs, or theories about them. Both are utterly impersonal... and no one is exempt.

Jesus's morality: altruism.

No, they're not. You admitted so yourself, when you used the word "deserve". Amoral people don't use the word "deserve".

Are you familiar with the term "muppet" as applied by Goldman-Sachs employees to their own customers?

Why I Am Leaving Goldman-Sachs

The application here would be that GS are advising their muppets to sell their gold and related holdings, and GS would be happy to perform that service for them. Of course GS would keep the gold and gold-related investments while making commissions on selling inferior investments as replacements.

The balif cries, "All rise,"

The Honorable Reader enters.

The balif announces, "The supreme mental court of this human consciousness is now in session. The Honorable Judge Reader presiding."

"You may be seated."

The balif cites, "Docket number 1074, the case of Atlas Shrugged: morality of altruism vs. morality of egoism."

"Is the prosecution ready?"

"I am, your Honor", Miss Rand replies.

"Is the defense ready?"

"I am, you Honor", Miss Rand replies.

"You may proceed."

That could make for a rather novel approach.

Earth date: January 3, 2013. William Shatner—most famously known as “Captain Kirk” from Star Trek—sent a Tweet to Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut currently commanding the International Space Station.
Shatner Tweeted, simply, “@Cmdr_Hadfield Are you tweeting from space?” Hadfield replied, “Yes, Standard Orbit, Captain. And we’re detecting signs of life on the surface.”
This is remarkable for at least two reasons. First, it illustrates that, in some important ways, we are living in the future portrayed by Star Trek. No, we cannot “beam” people around or travel faster than light. But we can carry around pocket computers once found exclusively in science fiction; we can communicate with people in space; and we are witnessing the private space race heating up, promising bold future ventures into the Final Frontier.
Shatner’s Tweet also illustrates the power of art. Recently my wife and I watched several documentaries about Star Trek, one featuring the son of Gene Roddenberry (creator of the series), another included on a disk release of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a third directed by Shatner himself. Watching these documentaries, I was struck by the stories of scientists working in technology and space engineering who were inspired to pursue their careers by watching the old black-and-white television show featuring Captain Kirk. Star Trek presented to them a vision of a future they wanted to live in—and they decided to help achieve it.
Although I often disagree with the political views expressed in the series, I too have found Star Trek to be great and inspiring art. Hats off to the creators of the series and to the scientists and explorers it has inspired. And “thank you” to Shatner and Hadfield for creatively reminding us of such greatness.
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Related:
Transfiguring the Novel: The Literary Revolution in Atlas Shrugged
SpaceX Founder Musk Envisions Mars Colony: Potential Value is Immense

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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It isn’t Galt’s Motor from Atlas Shrugged, the fictional generator that pulls unlimited amounts of static electricity from the air. Still, an innovative new use of available materials shows promise in converting static electricity into power for small devices.
Katherine Bourzac, writing for the MIT Technology Review, explains the work led by Georgia Tech’s Zhong Lin Wang:


The Georgia Tech researchers demonstrated that [a] static charge phenomenon, called the triboelectric effect, can be harnessed to produce power using a type of plastic, polyethylene terephthalate, and a metal. When thin films of these materials come into contact with one another, they become charged. And when the two films are flexed, a current flows between them, which can be harnessed to charge a battery. When the two surfaces are patterned with nanoscale structures, their surface area is much greater, and so is the friction between the materials—and the power they can produce.
This technology provides enough power for such things as pacemakers, LEDs, and small batteries for cell phones and other devices. The advance is a wonderful example of how devotion to reason and science improves human life.
Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.
Related:
Apple’s App Revolution: Capitalism in Action
Heroic Researchers Markedly Improve Thought-Controlled Prosthetics for the Severely Paralyzed

Creative Commons Image: Ken Bosma

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Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology enroute to the mind of a Political Science student interested in clarifying some details brought up in OPAR.

Oh, how I love this — and how we need it today.

Don’t judge humanity by the actions of a lone moral monster. Instead, focus on the many, many people who abhor this vicious injustice and offer help to the innocent victims. Better yet, be one of those good people when and where you can.


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Fresh red meat is always irresistable to carnivores...



Thanks. The atmosphere here is quite pleasant and cordial.

There is no foreplay with your people is there?

This is one of two forums that is worth posting on. The other is about tabletop games. I like the people here a lot, so welcome!

Sam Harris is also discussed in the thread "The Illusion of Free Will".

Because it is a proper noun, "Objectivism" and "Objectivist" should be capitalized.

You already know about the thread "Weak vs. Strong Emergence"

"Scientific Challenges to Free Will" makes many good points, but one which appears there and which I have used in the past is that these reaction time tests are pointless because we do not need free will to follow an urge on a cue. 'That is not what free will is for', to hijack and paraphrase someone else's phrase. A single instance of an explicit self-consciously carefully reasoned conclusion which one accepts and acts upon although it may be surprising or against one's prior biases or assumptions is sufficient to establish the existence of volition even if much of our other behavior is rote or automatized. Or in other words, 'downward causation' from the conceptual level into physical action is what free will is for.

The mental disposition toward fighting for the moral high ground is the recognition that morality is the recognition of man's proper relationship to reality. The common misconception is that it can be circumvented without adverse consequences.

Why do Western politicians and the Mainstream Media hale and defend Islam? Why do they promote the welfare state? Why do literary critics lionize salacious and third-rate novelists? Why do art critics exhaust Roget's Thesaurus in their praise of anti-art? Why do politicians and journalists side with the global warming advocates, and then, when global warming has been repudiated, side with "climate change" advocates who promote the same fraud? What makes these paradoxes so common in our culture?



There are several explanations, none of them pretty or complimentary. There are three main culprits: subjectivism, egalitarianism, and relativism.

Let us begin with relativism. Without critiquing Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, that theory somehow infected the realm of thinking in the West. It was attractive to those who were critical of the West and its economic, technological, and scientific achievements. They were drawn to it like moths to a light bulb. Einstein's theory is an attempt to explain the relationship between gravity and entities with mass and the speed of light. However, there is something alluring about the term "relative" to cultural relativists, multiculturalists, ethical relativists, moral relativists, artistic relativists, and every other kind of relativist. It allows them to discard the Newtonian concepts of time, space, and gravity, to discard the concepts of sensory perception, objective reality, and reality itself.  And especially of the volitional nature of man's mind. It allows them to dispense with absolutes, certainty, values and value measurement.

Relativism is the cowardly form of nihilism, whose end is to destroy man's cognition and his capacity to hold values by elevating the mediocre, the nondescript, and the irrational.

As Ellsworth Toohey, the arch villain of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, articulated the principal method:

"Don't set out to raze all shrines — you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity — and the shrines are razed."

It is for the sake of the mediocre, the nondescript, and the average that the relativists have waged a constant and enervating war.

Subjectivism is the position that no opinion, statement, or observation is more valid (or truer) than another's. Truth, therefore, is "subjective," dependent on an individual's unique "perspective." Truth cannot be known for a certainty. An individual's perspective is governed and molded by his cultural "conditioning," or by his genes, or by his "class," or by his tribe or voting bloc. His "truth" is different from another individual's. His mind is but a passive receptor of things around him; he exercises no volition to judge and evaluate things. He is a reactor, not an actor.

Subjectivism is closely linked to egalitarianism, which asserts that, as with political equality, all values are of equal status and importance. All values are alike, and all distinguishing marks or measures applied to them are not only irrelevant, but even immoral, for they infer one value's superiority over another.

American lives and American treasure must be sacrificed to preserve the stagnant, filthy, mysticism-ruled cultures of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Egypt, because they have every "right" to exist as does America.

Palestinians have every right to hate Israel, because Israel is what they are not.

When you examine the relativists' arguments, you will see that truth has nothing to do with their concern for truth. Truth is thrown out the window in favor of some unprovable Platonic "form" because, their philosophical mentors have said, the things one sees are but rough, indistinct sketches of those things which exist in their "perfect" forms in another realm not discernible to our senses or which confounds them. Or, as an alternative, they are Kantian defined entities that have no relation to themselves or even to any other-worldly "forms," because, the Kantians say, our senses so totally warp our perception of things "as they really are" that what we see is nothing at all. According to Kant, our minds are pre-programmed and biased to process sensory data and to assign absurd and completely arbitrary labels to everything we see, hear, touch, or know, because we have this sinful urge to pretend we know things.

Any way we look at it, say the Platonists and the Kantians and their numerous academic and journalistic protégés, it's sheer, hubristic sophistry, and men ought to be mature enough to concede that they're nothing but miserable, shapeless forms of random matter with delusions of grandeur.

Consensus plays a role in this brand of relativism. The more people who believe in a certain, opinion, statement, or observation, the "truer" it must be, because so many people agree with it (or disagree with it, so it must be "not true").  This is the popular understanding of "truth." It raises the concept of "number" to the status of a golden calf or an extrasensory oracle in a trance to be worshipped and heeded and deferred to. Thus, "truth" is determined democratically, by majority rule, because numbers are imbued with some magical efficacy to make things true. Reality, it would appear, is susceptible to stuffed ballot boxes and governed by numerology wedded to astrology.

Reality says that the South Side Chicago criminal gang took care of the North Side gang by inviting them to a peace conference and to a share of the Detroit Purple Gang's stolen whiskey, but instead lined them up against a wall and machine-gunned them. The liberal/left multiculturalist fantasy world premise says it's Hamas showering Israel (now cast by Islamists and the Left as a gang) with harmless Fourth of July fireworks, then inviting Israel to a cease-fire and peace talks and a plate of halal cookies fresh from the U.S. and Egypt, and then shooting Iranian-made paint balls at the Israelis, swearing on a stack of Korans that Hamas means no harm.

The doyens of diversity claim that the political aspirations of terrorists, whose means of persuasion include murder and mayhem and destruction, are no less legitimate than those of Israelis, who live in relative freedom and are a productive nation, whom they also charge with murder, mayhem, and destruction. Western pragmatists (another species of relativist) state that Israelis have nothing to fear by being encircled by a Palestinian state and other Muslim states, or even living in a "One State" with millions of Muslim Rodney Kings who just "want to get along."

Reality says that any works by Jean-Léon Gerome, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Daniel Chester French, or virtually any notable 19th century painter or sculptor (except Rodin, who was a kind of bridge between representational art and the abstract) is superior to anything produced in the 20th century by Warhol, Pollack, Picasso, Giacometti, etc. Relativist esthetic criticism says that no work of art is superior to another, because everyone sees things differently, it's all relative to one's culture or genes or class. Rodin's or Giacometti's "Walking Man" is just as good as Michelangelo's "David" or Frédéric Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty.  

But relativists do not completely eschew measurement of values in any realm. For example, they would gain nothing by comparing a Kewpie Doll to a Hummel figurine, and claiming that they are of equal esthetic value (which, in fact, they are). What they need is a standard to muddy, sully, and obliterate, and would proceed to assert an esthetic equivalence between a Kewpie Doll and a statue of Leonidas, hero of Thermopylae. This is nihilism in action. Leonidas perishes; the Kewpie Doll survives.

Beauty, they say, is in the eyes of the beholder. But if the beholder doesn’t agree that something is beautiful, in modern culture he is free to spray paint it or take a hammer to it or cover it with a linguistic burqa lest it offend the subjective proclivities of other beholders.

Reality says that you are being of volitional consciousness who can think and make value judgments about what will advance your life and act to secure your happiness as a rational individual. The liberal/left fantasy view says that you are but a cog or a cipher of your class, race, tribe, gender, or group or social environment, a puppet of determinism helpless to be anything but what you are and to do whatever it is you do. Reason and rationality are simply "perspectives" no better or no more valid than psychosis or channeling the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt or believing in witches or Hobbits or Muslim warlords who rode to heaven on white steeds to confer with Allah and the angels.

Reality is taking advantage of the First Amendment and saying anything one likes, as crudely or as elegantly as one wishes, without inviting legitimate charges of slander or libel, and accepting the rewards or the flack for having done so. Fantasy World First Amendment rights, however, must be policed to protect and preserve the feelings, dignity, self-esteem, and image of anyone who is slighted by the least amount of genuine or deserved criticism, particularly groups with political claims to victimhood and discrimination.

Thus, if one demonstrates that Islam and Muslims are out to conquer the world and establish a global caliphate, that proof is not protected by the First Amendment, and one can be harassed, shunned, marginalized, censored, sued or jailed. Muslims who noisily demonstrate in public streets and carry signs that say "Islam Will Dominate the World," and "Freedom of Speech Go to Hell," or establish a Facebook page dedicated to discussing how best to roast Jews and apostates, are protected, and are rewarded with continued welfare benefits and special accommodations and the sympathy of a press silenced its own unacknowledged brand of "Islamophobia."  

The best method of bursting any relativist balloon discussed in this column is to inform the relativist: You are making an absolute statement. Isn't that against the rules? Aren’t you violating your own maxim? How can you be certain that what you're saying about relativism is true?

But few people realize how easy it is to correct the subjectivist, multiculturalist, or egalitarian. The sharp relativist will reply: How do you know it isn't true? It's then that you'll realize that the relativist is playing mind games with you, and that his chief end is to make you doubt the evidence of your senses, question the efficacy of your reason, and help him negate the supremacy of your values.

It's then that dialogue should end with the relativist, and it will be up to you to terminate it. Unless you are addicted to the sophistry of an intellectual Möbius strip.

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Hmmm...

The Federal Reserve System is the perfect symbol of the mixed economy then.