Hairnet

Sometimes christians come onto campus and start preaching on literal soap boxes. They stand around peacefully and usually don't say anything more inflamatory than "you all commit adultry", which by their definition is probably true for most college students. They then try to hand their materials. No one throws stones at them or even argues with them, no one throws rocks at them. I think this is because the kind of people at my school know that violence in unnacceptable under most circumstances.


http://www.theblaze.com/stories/screaming-anti-islam-protesters-taunt-muslims-with-pigs-head-youre-going-to-melt-in-the-fires-of-hell/

The video in this article shows multiple signs that are clearly meant to inflame people. Its obvious that their intention wasn't to spread their religion, but to ruin people's day. One calling their prophet a child molester.

Fact is though, that fair is probably the worse place for Christians to preach/troll/protest . You have large groups of teenagers (in the video it looked like a lot of teenagers) who are probably sexually repressed by their religions (Orthodox Christianity and Islam) and also happen to be part of an unpopular ethnic group (arabs) and religions (weird catholicism and the terrorist religion). If I want commentary on the muslim religion and the cultures that it produces I would look to nations populated by muslims (Indonesia, Saud Arabia etc) not the actions of stupid high school kids looking for a fight.

If you are confident and have stuff going on in your life, you are not going to be showing those looser tendencies that women hate. That is why confident dudes don't need to read those pick-up-artist guides. Because the people who read those things are attempting to fake that sort of behavior.


I have found it is best to be yourself. Well myself.

I mean if you suck, I could see why that would be a problem. In which case you should probably not be trying to date anyone, and should be busy filing up your life with meaningful activity.

If you are confident and have stuff going on in your life, you are not going to be showing those looser tendencies that women hate. That is why confident dudes don't need to read those pick-up-artist guides. Because the people who read those things are attempting to fake that sort of behavior.


I have found it is best to be yourself. Well myself.

I mean if you suck, I could see why that would be a problem. In which case you should probably not be trying to date anyone, and should be busy filing up your life with meaningful activity.

There weren't even enough people there to warrant what we would consider a government. Its like having three guys in the woods trying to survive and attempting to form a government for the purpose of law and order. Simple use of self defense and ostracism is enough and anything more is impractical. Frontiersmen in super-low populated areas used voluntary modes of dispute resolution in the old west. I read something about cattle farmers who joined clubs that helped figure out who owned what and such. It seemed to work while there was only five people every fourty square miles.

Population is extremely important when looking at what a society can and can not do. If we don't have enough people, then there is less of a division of labor, which means society needs to return to more affordable means of living.

Were there any Jihadists active in iraq until we removed their secular dictator?

(I don't ask rhetorical questions often, and I am not doing a Google search because i trust my fellow forum members on these issues more than I trust various internet articles filled with bs).

1) I think individual actions are being judged on the basis of aggregates. This isn't a correct way to analyze things. Most individual actions can't be judged as ethical or unethical based on GNP.

I have no responsibility to increase GNP as much as I possibly can.

Giving a man a sandwich he didn't earn isn't the harm that is being done. The circumstances that create that dependency in the first place is the problem.

2) I did a lot of charity work in my teenage years. It was awful. I "volunteered" at a nursing home that focused on dimentia patients, several soup kitchens, and even an impoverished minority neigborhood. I don't understand how anyone can work in a nursing home, maybe I was just sensitive at the time, but its depressing.

I have found that most of the really endangered people who recieve charity have mental illnesses that go beyond the helpfulness of ethical instruction. We aren't really talking about an unofrtunate vs immoral dichotomy, because we have to consider that many of those men and women's minds have been permantely damaged by a variety of life experiences that could have come from misfortune, flaws in our polticial economy, or just average immorality. Until psychotherapy becomes a meaninful science meant to help actually dysfunctional people, these people can only just be supported out of a good will.

3) Another issue that needs to be considered is the fact that poverty is extremely relative. Some of the people that are considered poor are at worse living a lifestyle that would have been considered futuristic in the 1970s and 1980s. I know people who are much wealthier than I am (I am a student and work at golf course, so I meet a lot of different people). Those people have afforded themselves lifestyles that allow them to do things that would neve be in my power to do, but in the future may be possible for any average citizen to do so.

I suppose it is some strange facet of human psychology that allows people to experience arbitrary rage and envy when they see someone with more wealthy than them. I have always questioned why people need to be equal. I don't care if there are people with floating palaces, it doesn't affect me at all if someone has more wealth or less wealt than I do if I have the same ammount of wealth I already did. Yet somehow people let it get into their head that the wealth of another is somehow realted to their own by default.

And hey, if you do envy something of someone elses, thats fine, just emulate what their virtues and get it yourself.

5) So my point is that the are usually bordering on insane or aren't really that unfortunate.


Unfortunate people should and will always be helped because rational people hate random tragedies.

1) I think individual actions are being judged on the basis of aggregates. This isn't a correct way to analyze things. Most individual actions can't be judged as ethical or unethical based on GNP.

I have no responsibility to increase GNP as much as I possibly can.

Giving a man a sandwich he didn't earn isn't the harm that is being done. The circumstances that create that dependency in the first place is the problem.

2) I did a lot of charity work in my teenage years. It was awful. I "volunteered" at a nursing home that focused on dimentia patients, several soup kitchens, and even an impoverished minority neigborhood. I don't understand how anyone can work in a nursing home, maybe I was just sensitive at the time, but its depressing.

I have found that most of the really endangered people who recieve charity have mental illnesses that go beyond the helpfulness of ethical instruction. We aren't really talking about an unofrtunate vs immoral dichotomy, because we have to consider that many of those men and women's minds have been permantely damaged by a variety of life experiences that could have come from misfortune, flaws in our polticial economy, or just average immorality. Until psychotherapy becomes a meaninful science meant to help actually dysfunctional people, these people can only just be supported out of a good will.

3) Another issue that needs to be considered is the fact that poverty is extremely relative. Some of the people that are considered poor are at worse living a lifestyle that would have been considered futuristic in the 1970s and 1980s. I know people who are much wealthier than I am (I am a student and work at golf course, so I meet a lot of different people). Those people have afforded themselves lifestyles that allow them to do things that would neve be in my power to do, but in the future may be possible for any average citizen to do so.

I suppose it is some strange facet of human psychology that allows people to experience arbitrary rage and envy when they see someone with more wealthy than them. I have always questioned why people need to be equal. I don't care if there are people with floating palaces, it doesn't affect me at all if someone has more wealth or less wealt than I do if I have the same ammount of wealth I already did. Yet somehow people let it get into their head that the wealth of another is somehow realted to their own by default.

And hey, if you do envy something of someone elses, thats fine, just emulate what their virtues and get it yourself.

5) So my point is that the are usually bordering on insane or aren't really that unfortunate.


Unfortunate people should and will always be helped because rational people hate random tragedies.

Depends on the guy.

Hello,

I disagree. Peikoff is not at all known for speaking well on the spot. Just look up clips of him on fox news and all the bad press he has gotten for Objectivism, this is precisely why Yaron Brook now goes on the NPR, Fox, and such. Peikoff is a good writer, when he has the time and energy (and an editor) to help him craft a clear and concise message.

His statement honestly didn't make much sense because it was refering to way to much that wasn't said. All people do this where they say something that sounds really strange, because they only say part of a thought, so the rest of the thought was taken out of context.

I am not defending the statement, rather peikoff. If he meant what some people are implying he meant, that would mean some pretty bad things about his character. I do not think he endorsed the policy of "If you can get her in the house, she is yours morally" policy. Honestly it wouldn't be coherent with the rest of his stated ideas, or the implications of the very next paragraph in that podcast. There is also the fact that he said this as an offhand qualifer for his next statement.

It is clear he mispoke and he just has to come out and say something along the lines of

" A woman consensually having sex can not say "no" before hand, and presume to have sex consensually, and then later claim that she was raped".

or the more contraversial

"Sometimes "no" does not mean "no", and a woman saying "no" is not always evidence of rape"

At worse he is arguing that there is some sort of implied consent in a womans behavior that can contradict her words, and that a womans words are not the whole story when it comes to consent.

Peikoff was using the Kobe Bryant case as his prime example. So yes this would probably give us the best idea of what he was talking about. What he said was honestly too vague to gleam any "principle" out of. Considering that he just said that it is immoral to lie to someone in order to have sex with them, I doubt that he meant that you could force someone to have sex with them after they tell you that they don't want to.

It sounds as though his recollection of the Kobe case was that a woman gave Kobe every signal that she wanted to have sex with him, she told him that she didn't want to when they went up to his room, they ended up having sex anyways (without the use of force), and then she later claimed that her earlier comment made their sexual activity rape on the part of Kobe.

By "frees the man to have sex" he means that he shouldn't have to worry about prosecution later. Not permission to force women in his house to have sex with him.

In this I would have to agree.

I will have to go back on my earlier statement. I don't think the facts of the Kobe case are actually what is important. Apparently Peikoff may have had no idea what he was talking about.

What was important was that he clearly had an idea of what had happened. That narrative, although fictional, was what was important, not the actual case. The reason is that Peikoff was trying to illustrate (very poorly, and for no reason) a case where a woman wasn't raped.

People's "intuitions" aren't basless. What I find strange about irrationalists is that their treatment of emotional responses is so mystical. Hume was writing as though desires had no precedent in earlier experience.

There may be the occasional case when someone's desires may be based in a hormonal response. This kind of stuff though is mostly important to psychiatrists who study things like puberty, pregnancy, or even the chemical factors of addiction.

However a moral responses are developed. We know that there aren't "natural" moral responses due to the variety of moral responses that have existed in cultures around the world. Some people are perfectly fine with what we feel to be morally reperehensible. I think it is reasonable to assume that people develope morals though a combination of experience, reflection and upbringing.

Peikoff was using the Kobe Bryant case as his prime example. So yes this would probably give us the best idea of what he was talking about. What he said was honestly too vague to gleam any "principle" out of. Considering that he just said that it is immoral to lie to someone in order to have sex with them, I doubt that he meant that you could force someone to have sex with them after they tell you that they don't want to.

It sounds as though his recollection of the Kobe case was that a woman gave Kobe every signal that she wanted to have sex with him, she told him that she didn't want to when they went up to his room, they ended up having sex anyways (without the use of force), and then she later claimed that her earlier comment made their sexual activity rape on the part of Kobe.

By "frees the man to have sex" he means that he shouldn't have to worry about prosecution later. Not permission to force women in his house to have sex with him.

In this I would have to agree.

Jesus Christ, stop already. Peikoff's comment was a throwaway line on the nature of consent, not the morality of sex. At worst, he's wrong about the Kobe Bryant case. Stop acting like you guys never said anything based on insufficient information.

He did not say it's moral to have sex with a woman even if "the parts don't fit", he didn't even say it's moral to have sex with her if she's doesn't like it. He didn't say it was OK to choke her even though she's not into that, he didn't say it was OK to twist her arm behind her back to cause pain, but making sure you leave no physical mark, he didn't say it's OK to anally rape a man.

And yet, all those lovely images somehow made it into people's arguments on how he is wrong. I guess what he actually said isn't all that egregious. Why else would you feel the need to spice it up like that?


I do not wish to continue this post. I want to stop. Hope that's clear, I want this to be the end of my post. I don't want to write this next part. I don't wanna. No. (this last No. should be read in a forceful tone, please)

Anyways: sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Obviously. If there is no fraud or force involved (which, incidentally, Peikoff made sure to specify), then that person is free to leave at any time. Their declarations really don't mean as much as their actions. The owner of this site has no reason to feel bad about me continuing this post despite my declaration that I don't want to. The declaration was pretty meaningless. They often are.

Rape means having sex with a woman against her will, not without her explicit consent. In Peikoff's example (though I have no idea if also in the actual case he cited, because, like I said, I don't keep up with celebrity news), the woman is clearly there by choice, and free to leave at any time. Unless next you guys are planning to also add kidnapping to the list of stuff Peikoff never said but somehow found their way into this thread anyway.

The book he wrote suggests he doesn't. You're gonna go with the pointless speculation off of the throwaway line in a podcast though, huh?

I do not think it is a good idea to say that ambition and the will to power are the same thing. Nietzshe's theory seems to be one of psychological egoism, a more specific form of it. Basically all people in one way or another want to feel like there in control of something in their life, and they all try to achieve this in some way. Most of the time people partiall achieve this in a bunch of areas in there life, some people are really good at it, and some people just suck at it and are misearable or die. Ethics then would be a way to inform people on how to help people gain this power.

Rand said that values came from biology, that values were necessary for survival, this seems to fit that theory.


on conflicts of interest

I think Ayn Rand wants people to be able to detatch themselves from values that they don't deserve.

It takes a person who is extremely honest with themselves to say to themselves that someone deserves something more than them because they can provide more. That honesty I think in the end pays off, because if you are aware of your own problems you can fix them.

Not to throw a wrench in this conversation or anything, but have you considered the connection between the Nietzsche and Ayn Rand when it comes to her theories on flourishing and the psychological theory of the will to power.

I follow H. L. Mencken's interpretation of Nietzsche. Nietzsche often reads like a reactionary, someone who wants to turn back the clock to pre-christian times for the sake of progress (thus the connection to the fascists). So I understand why people don't like him.

H. L. Mencken viewed the will to power as Nietzsche's sociological and psychological explanation for morality in all of its variations. So the idea is there is a biological impulse to reproduce and gain power over one's environment. This impulse has created man, who has a rational faculty that allows them to choose between alternatives, man constructs moralities based on varying factors, these moralities may work for a time or not at all. The morality may become so maladaptive that it causes a collapse in civilization.

So from an Objectivist point of view, these moralities get integrated into man's subconscious, and have a powerful sway over him, which allows societies to operate as a unit, and even cause people to do things that are against their own interests such as jump on a grenade.

I think Ayn Rand's morality is a rationally constructed means of satisfying that will to power. I am not saying that Ayn Rand's epistemological or metaphysical systems are anything like Nietzsche's, I am just saying Nietzsche made some helpful theories that could help elaborate on Ayn Rand's work.

In essency I am looking at sociology, psychology, biology, and anthropology to help elaborate on man's nature.

Was that Nathaniel Brandon?

I just find this whole idea of dogmatism silly. If someone believes something of course they are going to think they are right. Especially if they happened to be the originator of a whole new system of beliefs. It would be dishonest for someone to say "Oh I have only been working on this and preaching this for the last four decades, but of course I may be wrong". I don't think anyone who writes books and speaks about their ideas all the time can't rightfully claim uncertantity. That sort of claim is cowardly in my opinion because it is just a way of attempting to assert one's conclusions without taking responsibility for them.


In addition to this Ayn Rand never said anything along the lines of "I am right because I am right", or "If you do not already know, you will not understand". She often asserted things without providing all the concievable evidence that could be provided, but I understand that she was relying on the reader's honest review of experience to maker her point for her.

In addition to this, many of her comments were just that, comments. They were not meant to be taken in the same way as he non-fiction books. So comments about homosexuals, all contemperary composers being terrible, and so forth are just things she honestly thought but had no intnetion of going about proving it for others.

If someone wanted to prove that Ayn Rand was dogmatic they would have to find an example of her clearly loosing an argument but refusing to admit it.

She has two main points.

1) Ayn Rand's philosophy is practical. It isn't for me however because it doesn't fit with my life or experience.

Re) This is total subjectivist non-sense. There isn't some uniqueness hiding in her brain that makes what she is special or valuable. If she is wrong, she needs to change to being right, not try to find things that fit with her wrong. She has already stated that Objectivism is actually functional, but it just doesn't jive with her. Too bad. You only get to live one life, no one is worth giving that up, even your "self".

I have heard people on the chat call this Kantian Egoism, because it sees the ego as this mysterious absolute that can't be really questioned. Max Stirner's egoism is the best example of this thinking. It is totally wrong, consciousness has an identity and has no value (I don't know if the word value is appropriate in this context, perhaps function makes more sense here) apart from its ability to deal with reality.

2) Capitalism leads to tyranny.

Re) I suspect she is a libertarian socialist, because those sorts of people make this argument quite a lot. Essentially they say that the free market as a process hasn't existed and can not exist. Anything attempting to come close to this system will inevitably become a means to promote inequality, and from that it will promote oppression, as all oppression is rooted in inequality.

First of all there doesn't seem to be any link necessitating a relationship between inequality and oppression. This is an illusion that comes from the modern political spectrum which measures thought in terms of egalitarian vs hierarchy. This puts Anarchists (real Anarchists, not "Anarcho"-"Capitalists") on the left, and Nazis, Stalinists, Liberals, Conservatives, Theocrats, Monarchists, and Free Marketers on the right. So in their eyes all of these groups are very similar, just their methods of oppression are different.

The fallacy of this can be highligthed by the Anarchist/Libertarian Socialist's inability to pick friends and allies. While Objectivsts are betrayed by conservatives and libertarians quite often, they never do anything real horrible. Even a centrist like Bush wasn't all that bad compared to presidents in the past such as Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.

Look at the spanish civil war though. What sides were fighting? From wikipedia.

The "Right"

The Falange

* National Syndicalism was to be the official ideology of the State.
o Corporate state in which class struggle would be superseded by the Vertical Trade Union, forcing workers and owners into one organization.
o Roman Catholicism
o Attention to the Castilian farmers
o Nationalist pride in the history of the Spanish Empire
o Anti-separatism
o Anti-communism, anti-anarchism and anti-capitalism
o Anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-parliamentarian ideology
o Paramilitarian

Is this capitalism? I mean, could you even call this conservative? Even right wing in the American sense of the word? Not even Neo-Cons or Paleo-Cons, the more embarrassing right wingers in America, would call any of these ideas desirable. Except anti-communism.

They also had some smaller factions such as Nazis and other groups.

The Left-

Anarchists
Progressives
Democratic Socialists
Moscow Communists
Non-Moscow Communists.

So the spanish civil war was a fight between anti-capitalists with medievalist-futurists (Fascists love contradiction) tendencies and the leftists all basically had the same egalitarian-humanist value systems. Sure the the leftists disagreed with one another about the role of authority and the state, periods of transition, and what should be up for election. But they all opposed the oppression and inequality caused by capitalism, they all have the same damn value system.

What happened? Anarchists, who do in some way support liberty, continually either defaulted on their anti-state views or got gunned down by their supposed allies. This happens time and time again all over the world. It happened during the Russian revolution as well where the Bolsheviks fired artillery on a an Anarchists occupied city. Che and Castro killed Anarchists. Noam Chomsky, said he had hopes for Pol Pots regime.

When I said they default on their beliefs, read this http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/spain.htm.

It doesn't seem like Capitalists are the ones in danger of supporting an impossible system that will tend towards tyranny. At least our ideological allies on the right don't kill us or commit genocide. In fact the closer you tend to get towards capitalism the more free things are, the closer you tend to get towards socialism (the further away from markets, or the more egalitarian you get), the more things get worse.

Summary

- Pick your ideas based on what right, not what fits you.
- History shows that there is a conflict between two types of anti-capitalists, one is considered the center, the other the left. The Spanish Civil War was an exquisite example of leftists slaughtering one another (at least some American Corporations could profit off it.
- Anarchists, who believe in liberty and equality at the same time, pick sides with the other egalitarians.
- They are back stabbed or give up their liberty supporting beliefs.
- On the American Right, even the most irrational people who could be called right are not going to shoot us or commit genocide or anything of the sort.