Boydstun

Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload

No, I would not take that position. I certainly agree with your last-sentence position. But that is only a first and broad brush which leaves yet the determination among specifics whether a particular US person has the proposed right in all its perfection in the full context. The sinking of the Lusitania violated the rights to life of Americans onboard. What if the owners of the line were shipping also on the ship munitions to Great Britain for use against the Germans in the war when the Germans sank the ship? And suppose the Germans knew the smuggled munitions were on board. And suppose it had been Britain, not Germany, who had started that war. Would the American government be right to then, as they did in the real case, declare a right of Americans to safety in travel to belligerent countries, declare war on Germany, participate in a blockade that starved the German population, and send Americans to be maimed and killed in turning the tide against Germany on the battlefield? I don't know. What do you think? It seems that a lot of context has to be worked through for specific real-world situations, as you know from case law.

@EC Search on "Iran" in this report yeilds 0. Is the idea that the main monetary supporter behind the 9/11 attack was Iran based on a general speculative induction (like the US induction without verification of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before we invaded)? Saudi Government Complicity?

This is a real-life topic and good. I found that working to make money and then identifying with the production of the service we offered the public had only the disappointment that some of the co-workers or management could care less about our production specifically. They did not love it and revere it the way I did. I've known a lot of creative people who invested much in developing their skill in their particular area of ability and passion. For all of them, they had to make money by other means. During that period, one can feel that if one devotes investment in training for advancing oneself in the money-making enterprise, one is slipping away from continuing and ever accomplishing much in one's passion. Don't trust that feeling, I suggest. You can expand quite a bit in efforts to make more money, without snuffing out that other, very special side of yourself in its cultivation, and, with long enough healthy life, you may reach life in which your passion is the center of your days.

Nukes deliverable with the capability of the Russian force are the most salient concerning US preparations for preemptive attacks. We can also wisely launch preemptive attacks against all sorts of non-nuclear plots and maneuvers and "clear and present dangers" that come up (similar to the heads-up we gave Austria recently and their preemptive action to foil an attack at a Taylor Swift concert). But continuous readiness for nuclear attack by Russia (anywhere) and need for preemption by us if we are going to be attacked is our standing condition (NORAD, ICBM's from land and sea, and our bomber aircraft [and perhaps anti-satellite capability]). The common American citizen response to aggressors (such as Iran) "nuke 'em" was sensibly addressed by Brook in his initial assessment concerning the Hamas attack on Israel a year ago. That address was sensible. One must include assessments of the radioactivity in the atmosphere as well as destruction, target and collateral, on the ground. I should add that crossing the nuclear threshold in any theater of violent conflict opens the slide to deuces-wild nuclear where two or more sides have nukes. We used to have tactical nuclear weapons in European NATO countries to counter the massive Red Army (whose maintenance eventually helped USSR go broke). Both sides understood that using a tactical nuke opened the way to a nuclear strategic exchange, and this was a deterrent to Soviet Russian aggression against a NATO member, additional to any USSR worry of losses to their army. On the topic of who is "us" additional to us in the States—I'd surely include US Marine peacekeepers in Lebanon during the civil war of that country (1983). Also, ships with Americans aboard—defense against pirates, terrorists, and nation states. At the other extreme, I had hoped by this stage of my life to have traveled to St. Petersburg, visited the museums and historic buildings and bridges and cemeteries and monuments and traced out as they stand today all the places mentioned in We The Living. I had wanted to write a book titled "A Walk with Kira", and somewhere in my paper files is the first, haunting line, all ready to go. But relations with Russia went hostile on account of Putin. I would no more visit Russia today than during the Iron Curtain. If I went over there now and were taken for Putin's collection of American hostages, it would be my own damn mistake. The US government would owe no protection for a supposed right to travel and get acquainted with a foreign place.

When thinking about whom and when we should launch a military attack, who has attacked us and whether a country has attacked us is of prime importance for overall military strategy for keeping America safe from attacks. The American policy of "We will not attack you if you do not attack us" is a wise accompaniment to "If you attack us, we will attack you." The proper response to the 9/11 atrocity was to attack and destroy the instigators and their terrorist network, including in their headquarters-hideout in Afganistan, not to attack Iran in response (as favored by EC), Iran who had nothing to do with that atrocity. Physical acts are the core for criminal law and for US military acts in defense of the US.

@SpookyKitty Does every word, as in use, not as in consideration, enlist a concept in its success at meaning in the word? Do prepositions in use have an enlisted concept satisfying your criteria for a concept? For example, can you work through how each of your conditions are satisfied for the preposition "of"? Rand tried to outline how prepositions fall within her theory of concepts. But she took them all to be as fundamentally operations of the mind, which I think false in the case of conjunction. Does your group of criteria on concepts entail that they all can stand in hierarchical taxonomic relations? Or anyway, is your group compatible with that taxonomy circumstance? When I think of the topic of concepts in recent decades, the names coming to mind are Christopher Peacocke's A Study of Concepts and Jesse Prinz's Furnishing the Mind. You might like to see how what you have distilled fits with what they got. Also, Meir Buzaglo's The Logic of Concept Expansion and, concerning the developmental psychology of concepts and smoothness with your formula, Susan Carey's The Origin of Concepts.*

One more thing, EC. The attack of the US on 11 September 2021 was perpetrated by a Sunni faction, principally out of Arabia. It was independent of the Shiite factions out of Iran. So, no, I don't think that atrocity would have been correctly answered by an attack on Iran.

This is not realistic. Broadcast radio and television were regulated by the US federal government, the FCC. It was not totalitarian. Compare with A B. During those years the press became more secure than ever against state interference, except for the Supreme Court allowing local levels of government to outlaw pornography. I have been thrilled that this new medium of communication has remained free of government regulation on its content. (The law is of course involved in any defamation suits that arise out of this public writing and illustration.) I have been thrilled that we have a Supreme Court very likely to rule on the side of free expression on the internet.* I understand the concern that foreign powers can flood the platforms with propaganda. They aim to inject lies, smoke, and conflict within this country using internet communication. We have used radio to try to bring some truth and light to people in totalitarian countries.* That is part of the difference between the dictator countries and ours: WHAT we aim for and practice. I am hopeful that the level of freedom of press and internet we have here will continue long beyond my life. No American Party or faction is on the brink of a coup over the First Amendment. Neither does either side have such a disloyal intention. Justice Thomas wants to restore legality of libel for criticism of public figures, an overturn of NYT v. Sullivan. But he is alone on that among the Justices last I read.

EC, I agree with your spirit, although not with all of those particulars. I do hope demise of the Iranian theocracy and its international terrorist auxilaries out to topple Western civilization and freedom can eventuate from this missile aggression against Israel. The monarchy in place in Iran, which was internally overthrown when you were two, was also a dictatorship. US support for that regime, pretty sure, was because it was part of the wall of anti-communist regimes around the Soviet Union. The situation was somewhat like when the Reds overthrew the Czar in Russia. Those are not evil-versus-evil international situations in which the US or other countries should militarily intervene, except with a view to US defense issues. Sometimes we have intervened to forestall a mass extermination, as we did in Bosnia, but in other cases (Nazi Germany and Cambodia and Rwanda), we did not. Many Americans would question US involvement for such humanitarian purposes. Consideration of US defense, as well as concern for mass killing (think Pakistan and India and nuclear proliferation), in the era of atomic and nuclear weapons has to include surveilling and assessing which hands have gotten control of those weapons anywhere in the world. No, we would have been off the rails to have intervened in 1979 to prop up the monarchy or to attempt getting Iran to adopt the democratic constitutional republican form of government. I was pleased to learn that the US ships in the region to support Israel shot down some of the incoming missiles from Iran. I imagine we also share with Israel information about military locations and maneuvers in Iran. President Biden gave the OK for the US to intercept Iranian missiles, and I think that was right. I hear now, however, that he is opposed to Israel putting nuclear facilities in Iran under a retaliatory attack by Israel. I hope they do that all the same. It seems a good opportunity, as you say. I have never bought the Iranian line that their interest in nuclear fuel was only to have independently operated nuclear electrical generation. Iran sits on top of one of the most vast fields of natural gas in the world. It is much cheaper and easier to build, maintain, and operate a gas-fired power station than a nuclear one.

R M Salsman – Welcome back to Objectivism Online.

Like this resource by professional philosophers. If you scroll down there, you do get a couple of entries on him, after the several more important philosophers named Peter. What I see there on him is not of interest to me. But you might find some address of his other ideas here. Offhand, I don't see why this question, HD, shouldn't be in the general Q&A sector, rather than the specialized Metaphysics and Epistemology sector.

*–"A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something" (Rand 1957, 1015). Similarly: before self-consciousness is consciousness. Or, in Edelman's terms: before secondary consciousness is primary consciousness. In the old technical vocabulary, the contradiction Rand mentions is actually not contradictio in terminis, but contradictio in adjecto, More specifically, it is the self-contradiction Rand housed under the rubric "stolen concept fallacy" (Rand 1957, 1039–40; Branden 1963; Salmieri 2016, 298–99). I should mention that "here is" and "is absent here" are heirs of a toddler's schemas prior to language, concepts, and any imagined alternatives to the physical spatial world. If a metaphysics not one's own is self-contradictory, then one would not claim that deep down one holding the contradictory metaphysics implicitly shares one's own metaphysics. Rand and Kant did not have even the same conception of what metaphysics is.* That would be a fun project to see if Rand (and I and Wolff and Aristotle) had the same conception of what is metaphysics as had post-Kantian German idealists to Lotze. But my horizon is packed, and that fun scholarship will have to wait for the horizon of someone else.

Drop the image of the alleged 'aliamber' woman into Google Lens.* How Rand connected the concept justice to empirical-action matters is given on page 51 of ITOE.