Maynard

Thanks for linking to Silber's piece. What he says (in this piece, but not in others) is well-nigh incontrovertible. To anyone here who doubts it, I advise you to read it - in full focus - particularly Ayn Rand's quote. You will see the difference between the conceptual mentality (which forms principles) and the anti-conceptual (which cannot see past concretes: "duh, Ayn Rand liked skyscrapers, they're the essence of achievement, so big skyscrapers are good, period! who cares who's paying for them, or whether there is any commercial reason to build them, or any of that other intellectual stuff - what are you, a cheese-eating appeasement monkey? If you don't agree, then look at this Cox and Forkim cartoon that explains it all....") The intellectual disgrace of the Capitalism Magazine site is bottomless. When the site first appeared, is when I began having doubts about the intellectual quality of the current crop of young "Objectivists" ... and about other things. So far, no one here has engaged Silber's argument (or dealt with the point of the poster here who made a trenchant reference to the excuses we might make for the Egyptian pyramids). Instead, we've had grousings about how Silber is an "idiot" because he left the reservation. I suppose Silber's point is unanswerable, since no one has answered it....

Not only that, but now there is *this*: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?t...storyID=6128807 Head for the hills! It's the return of the Dark Ages.

Nice. To win a war of ideas, bomb "enemy children." Combine this with the doctrine of pre-emptive war, and you are simply advocating genocide. But it *can't* be genocide, right? After all, they're ARABS. WE'RE the Chosen People. Er, you know, Americans.

To answer the question in your header: Objectivism is a set of ideas. So anyone with a working mind can subscribe to it, regardless of any other physical considerations such as ethnicity. Yes, there is such a thing as ethnically Jewish. You are ethnically Jewish if your mother is Jewish or one or both of your grandmothers are Jewish. As Dr. Peikoff said in his "Objectivism: Questions and Answers" tape (1985), Jews are of a certain biological tribe that has persisted down the centuries, in addition to being the adherents of a specific ideology. There are people who are ethnically Italian, Croatian, etc. This is the root of the concept "ethnicity." Everyone has an ethnicity. But no matter one's ethnicity, it cannot determine the content of one's conscious ideas. Only one's attitude toward one's ethnicity could do that. But one's attitude, being ideational, isn't determined (i.e. mandatory), either. This is why a sharp distinction is made (by rational people) between ideas and biological descent. Unfortunately, in Judaism ideas and descent have historically been conflated to a possibly unmatched degree. (No one talks about "the Portuguese religion," for instance, unless he is speaking somewhat metaphorically.) So, don't be confused by the notion that the existence of your ethnicity (whatever it may be) commits you to any outlook or ideology. It doesn't and can't. Nor can a general acknowledgement of the factual basis of ethnicity. Ethnicity exists *and* free will exists. They are unconnected unless we connect them. My problem elsewhere is with the people who connect them dishonestly, coming to conclusions that, in my opinion, are so bizarre as to be explanable only by reference to personal, psychological factors. For instance, Dr. Peikoff's rage against Christians and Muslims has aspects of psychopathology that just leap out at an objective observer. To be blunt, you have to "read" some people when they are making no sense; and I read Dr. Peikoff now as a Jewish racist. This mode of explanation may be dismissed as "psychologizing" - but when facing a philosophical folly, "don't bother to examine it - ask yourself only what it accomplishes or is intended to accomplish" ~ To paraphrase Ellsworth Toohey. Among other modes of explaining the seemingly unexplanable, I'd bring in Occam's Razor and "Que bono?", too.

I hope it is agreed that we should not bomb the schools during hours when they are in session. Or would our avoidance of bombing the schools whenever it best suits us be an acceptance of the altruistic principle that something comes above our survival? My modest proposal is to use bombs to take out bombs; ideas should be fought only with ideas. Bombs away,