philosopher

Political activism in general is a waste of time. What fundamentally decides a country's direction is the way people think, hence the focus of ARI and other Objectivist organizations on academia. It's a total waste of time getting a bunch of pro free market, pro individual rights politicians elected if the people can change their mind in 8 years and roll it all back again.

Objectivism can not tell you what to do in that situation. Rational philosophies build up their principles from looking at what repeatedly works in reality, but falling out of a plane without a parachute is something so out of the ordinary that principles worked out in everyday life just don't apply, so no guidance can be offered. Only someone who spent their entire life risking life and limb such as an adrenaline junkie or elite commando could come up with principles applicable to that situation.

I know that. I was merely making the point that poverty is the inability to pay for things. If the leftists really wanted to solve poverty the only industry they should have to nationalize in the finance industry. There's no reason for trying to nationalize education or healthcare. Unless of course you have additional reasons besides poverty alleviation, such as wanting some control over what gets taught, which is just a scary thought.

But it's not just immoral it's irrational. Human perception (eyes, ears, nose) is of the present. The only way to know the future is through concepts, and concepts are abstract - they only tell you in principle what to do. So if you are not acting on principle it is not only immoral but irrational.

The financing argument is another interesting one to use against statists I think. It's not a moral one, but a practical one (without implying the two are opposed). Namely, that lack of access to education or healthcare or such, if they wish to call it a "problem" (which I disagree with) is not a problem with the healthcare, education etc industries but with the finance industry. The job of education and healthcare industries is to educate and heal people, respectively. The job the finance industry is to help people pay for stuff. And until recently banks gave out credit cards like candy, so there should have been no need for public education or healthcare systems, even given that you think there should be someone controlling us all, solving these "problems" (which I don't).

Ok. I initially thought you might be comparing a poor uneducated free child with a poor educated free child, but then dismissed it, because in the context of this argument that would mean a poor educated free child whose education was paid for by government, which would be a contradiction. So I thought you must be comparing an uneducated free child with an educated statist child.

Even though it's irrelevant, I still wouldn't surrender that point to the statists. Having a society where individual rights were fully respected would, as you said, be so much more prosperous, that I wonder if an uneducated kid in such a place really would do worse than an educated one is ours. Even without an education you can start at the bottom and work your way up, and I'm sure there would be far more jobs available.

The reason we act on principle is precisely that we can not see the future, so we act based on what worked in the past. There's no such thing as 100% sure of no repercussions.

I agree with David Odden -- you need to look at what you are. You have a big brain, not claws, armor shell and razor teeth. Violence is not your means of survival but thinking. You should therefore not try to survive by killing other people. Also, if ideas are your means of survival, another person who is alive might comes up with some (ideas) but a dead person clearly won't. So it is not only "not your way" to attack and kill them, it is potentially to your benefit not too. (Of course, people have free will, and others may choose to act against their nature, but that is what police and courts are for.) Also, think of logical consistency. The parts of your identity that make reason your means of survival are also present on them. So to say your rights must be respected due to these attributes is to say theirs must be too.

They might not be all bad, but the point is the minute level of control they are exercising.

Even if the market consisted of 100% rational participants, it would still not guarantee success, since human being not omniscient. Perfect reason can be based on bad and/or incomplete knowledge and therefore fail. But if failure comes from error of reason or fact, it can be learned from, and success next time. Unlike failure due to government edict. Don't these people know that we survive by thinking and learning? They interfere with our process of learning, and cause disaster after disaster, god damn them.

I don't know why it doesn't have much academic recognition. I do know that when I read critiques of Objectivism by academics they usually haven't read it carefully enough. Also Ayn Rand didn't write her philosophy in a dry academic style. This is because she believed emotions could be objective, so there was no reason to leave them out of non-fiction. However most academics regard emotion as unprofessional and the opposite of reason (the "Spock" caricature of reason).

Isn't the whole field of economics based on a non-Objectivist premise? It starts with the idea that the government should choose the economic system and devises theories to help them decide. But shouldn't the government only protect individual rights (and therefore ignore the economy)?

I didn't like this movie at all, I thought it was anti-military and pro-primitivism. And just in case the "white man goes native" storyline was not enough fantasizing for the lefties, in this film ! Guffaw.

When someone calls you right wing they usually have a spectrum in mind with socialist/big government types on the "left" and pro-business people on the "right." This spectrum sounds like a communist invention to me, since it categorises you based on whether you are on the side of the exploiters (bosses) or the exploited (workers). If you think that whole notion is rubbish then you might prefer a different spectrum such as the one above with "use of force" at one end and "individual rights" at the other, in which case socialists and fascists are at the *same end* and the capitalist U.S. is at the other end (the good one).

Stolen concept? "Coincidence" presupposes there are things that happen for a reason and things that don't, and refers to one side of the divide.

People see that atoms have predictable behaviour, and we are made of atoms, so therefore we must have predictable behaviour. The error here is that "made of" is not the same as "is." The basic error is not grasping that "existence exists" means what it says. If you look at a man with the naked eye and he has limbs, torso, head etc, then those things exist. If you then look at him through a microscope and see atoms, then those things exist too. They are not both "appearances" of the same thing, because if a thing exists, it exists. Therefore man is not atoms, he is made of atoms, where "made of" is a relationship between existents.

I'm not sure it's correct to say ideas are in the brain. When I introspect on ideas they have certain attributes: clarity, meaning, groundedness, etc. but not location. That is another thing they are missing along with weight and size. As to whether they have a physical analog, maybe they do, but I don't think it's obvious either way. Yes, you are right, I should have said "existent" not "entity."

That sounds like a parody of lifeboat scenarios, I can't believe it's real.

That may be true scientifically (I don't know), but philosophically, just because an entity does not have certain attributes (such as weight or spatial extension), it does not follow automatically it needs an analog object elsewhere in the universe. I wonder - when forming a concept we attach a word to it, which is a perceptual concrete - a sound. Could the word be a proxy to allow a brain that evolved from perceptual beginnings to deal with abstract ideas. With the ideas themselves non-physical, so the analog is there, but it's not some neuron graph representing the idea in it's entirety, but just a simple proxy (though maybe still a neuron graph).

By non-physical I mean entities that don't possess the attributes of weight or spatial extension, but nevertheless exist, such as ideas. What is the weight of "love" - what is the spatial extension of "justice" - in that sense the mind is non-physical. Why does there have to be a physical thing that precedes every non-physical? If we (humans) are a combination of both the physical (brain/body) and non-physical (ideas) why can't some things originate in the physical side and some in the non-physical? Even granted that the non-physical depends on the physical for it's continued existence, it doesn't follow that everything has to start on the physical side. Maybe some things, such as hunger, start on the physical side and are noticed after the fact by the non-physical mind, and some things, such as the choice to focus, originate in the non-physical mind and are followed shortly after by action in the physical brain.

Sometimes what people are imaging is not what will actually be. They think things will be pretty much like now, except they won't have to worry about being poor. Of course that's not the case, as communist systems of the past have shown, lots of things change, things that aren't mentioned in that statement. Buildings turn grey, people lose motivation. Perhaps one answer is to say "So, you would like to live in communist Russia would you?" They will say "Of course not!" but then explain that you can't have one without the other.

Even in a society with an iron-clad constitution that fully protects individual rights, voting is still important. This is because the laws, no matter how correct, still have to be implemented by someone, and people can be corrupt or non-corrupt. This is where voting comes in. Yes, the laws should be decided objectively, though reason and thought, not majority rule. But the implementers of those laws should be chosen by majority because people are best at judging other people's character. There's no way a document can perceive a man and judge him, it's just a piece of paper.

I don't understand why you are so certain about that. Couldn't the choice originate in the non-physical, in the mind? Because choosing to focus is not going from "no mind" to "mind," it is going from "less focussed mind" to "more focussed mind." In fact it would seem to me the first place to look is the mind.