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Everything posted by Boydstun
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Reblogged:ESG, RIP?
Boydstun replied to Gus Van Horn blog's topic in The Objectivism Meta-Blog Discussion
I seriously doubt the diagnosis. I bet someone else did the making of chips better and cheaper (even with all THEIR wasted company time in communist indoctrination). Like that solar panel company we subsidized, and then it went under due to competitors in China. Hypersensitivity to ESG is for humanities students and MBA's. It is other folks who get the work done. That Intel's web page is filled with ESG stuff shows only what they like to advertise. The British Petroleum Company has made ridiculous commercials for years with BP being given the new symbolization Beyond Petroleum. If not born this morning, one knows that is ad distraction from what they do for a living every day. -
@whYNOT – I read this Executive Order closely right after it was issued. It seemed sensible to me. The legalities are apparently more complicated. On the psychological side, I think of this country as mine, this one alone as mine, and as having been mine since I was born. And it had nothing to do with heritage or social situation of my parents. The general idea of birthright citizenship seemed to align with and ratify that way of thinking. Considering that psychological side more closely, however, I don't think I became much aware of the social world so wide as the country and identify with it until a ways into the early grades of school. I do remember as early as first grade saying the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the National Anthem in class. Some of us boys did not seem to have a steady sense of solemnity concerning the latter, because we had our alternative words we sang, at least among ourselves alone: "Oh say can you see any black bugs on me? If you do, pick a few, and leave the rest for the teacher to chew." Certainly by 6th grade, I had firmly picked up the personal identification with country. The Yankee one, not the other attempt at one. The one with freedom in a world largely communist dictatorships and becoming more so. What years were you in America? Were you a citizen? In high school, the boys were called to an assembly at which military personnel explained that ahead of you was six years of service in one or another branch. I started doing some running to get in shape. But when I got the order for pre-induction physical, I'd been in college a couple of years and had read an underground subversive writer who proclaimed that my life belonged to me, not the state. So I was joyous to have flunked the physical due to my psychological condition in those days, and to have a future open to me to make my own life. And I didn't feel unpatriotic about that, because in other circumstances, such as a national emergency or all-out attack on the US, I'd gladly join the service. Some off-the-cuff remarks on issues you mentioned, Tony: These are not legal views, only ordinary. It had always seemed wrong that you were being drafted and you were not allowed to vote. Eventually, they fixed that by lowering the voting age. The idea of equal protection under the law has seemed an implementation of the feature in general conception of human rights: that each individual has equal fundamental rights because each is equally an end in themselves. Maybe more thinking about which rights are more fundamental could help in sorting out the legal implementation. That a man in Texas was subject to the law, yet denied public education for his children does not seem necessarily wrong, provided the law was not requiring specific performance from a peaceful man (such as military service) and provided he was not paying property tax, the usual main source of local school funding until recent years, when the State began funding more and more for those schools. (When I was a child, I heard that the oil companies were supporting the public education in Texas, rather than taxes, but I've not looked it up, and just now I have to shovel a lot of snow because West Virginia has seriously failed in its raison d'être.)
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The Trump Executive Order working its way through legal challenges (as of 2/10/25)
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Correct.* THAT was who the songwriter was talking about with his line "you're my hot ma-gandhi" in You're the Top.* ". . . making all American Indians US citizens."
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A History of Birthright Citizenship at the Supreme Court Citizenship of Native Americans My Grandfather Boydstun was a quarter Choctaw and would have citizenship under the Dawes Act concerning Indian Territory, to which that tribe had been removed from the South in the 1830's (by three Trails of Tears for that tribe). I don't know but what my Grandfather could have been an American citizen anyway already. After all, his paleface ancestors by his name had come to VA and MD in the 1600's before the Founders were born, and some of their descendants (born here, of course) fought for the American Revolution. American Indians fought in WWI for the US, and some of the Choctaw were Code Talkers. That military service was one of the factors leading to the 1924 Act of Congress making all Indians US Citizens. Oath for Naturalized Citizens ". . . that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law . . ."
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Keep the faith, but here's the real deal: Balancing the budget, assuming taxes are not increased, will require cutbacks in federal payouts to the US citizens, such as through SS, Medicare, FEMA, USDA. Since the latter two are intermittent, there might be enough votes in Congress to abolish them. I see that Musk has moved his aim away from balancing the budget to reducing the shortfall by only .5 trillion dollars. And the Washington Times imagines that the Trump proposed budget will not be a balanced one. We'll see before long. Perhaps it will be the usual dodge: a plan for a balanced budget in some number of years of which the present budget is the first step.
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Ballad of Baby Doe opera
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"My own" <-– Rand's ethics and Aristotle's I should have included also, in the area of metaphysics, my own ——> Entity and Ousia
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Let me be more specific. The real solution to making up the 1.8 trillion dollar deficit will come from the OMB under its new director. That will be actual serious stuff such as reducing the amount that people are receiving in their SS checks. I doubt he will propose increasing taxes directly. The rub for the fiscal conservatives in Congress and the head at OMB is that Trump likes to be popular. So they may have to settle for the small-potatoes show-time distractions of Trump/Musk cuts in government payroll and the usual phony talk about just gaining by greater efficiency and routing out corruption. Then budgets in the red will continue, translating into continued inflation, and Trump's affection for tariff power is going to continue to bolster financial uncertainty and higher prices. PS – I calculate that the amount we would have to reduce SS payments annually to each recipient is about $28,000. That would cover the 1.8 trillion dollar shortfall in the annual budget. But that reduction is $4,000 more than the SS annual incomes of the recipient. So there will have to be additional cuts, such as to Medicare, and/or there have to be big rise in taxes. There is also the alternative of more inflation which steals from people's life savings and their pensions. Readers of Heinlein remind us "there is no such thing as a free lunch." Rand reminds us "reality is not cheated."
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Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are disconnecting from the Russian grid.
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"My primary aim in this book [and the predecessor] is to provide an overview of philosophical debates about slavery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries [and eighteenth century] in Europe and America and of the role that race plays in those debates. This is important because distinctively modern forms of racism start emerging in this period. First, there are new forms of institutional racism: the transatlantic slave trade, colonial slavery, and the laws that govern them. The conquest and enslavement of American Indians by European colonists may be another example of institutional racism. These institutions, and European colonialism more generally, also spawned—or at least spread and transformed—racist ideas that are distinctively modern. After all, as Ibram X. Kendi puts it, such ideas are "the public relations arm" of racist institutions (2016, 509): they are attempts to legitimize racial slavery and other forms of racial oppression. Studying the ways in which authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discussed slavery is hence crucial for understanding the emergence of modern racism." (Jorati 2024, 3)
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The next collection in the series Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies is scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2025. Edited by Jim Lennox and Greg Salmieri, it is titled Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand. The volume has been through peer review, and the contracts have been signed. Contributing authors are completing some (minor) revisions, and the completed manuscript will go to the press before the end of the calendar year. I expect this to be the most important book in the series. (I have not yet read the recent one by Tara Smith. I have it and will get there.) Previous work: Roderick T. Long My own
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Pro-Russian Leader of Alignment of Eastern Ukraine with Russia Is Assassinated in Moscow
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(I wrote this one two mornings, yesterday and today.) Birth Days Sprung into the world, lullabied. Infant firmly furled. Alive, bide. Lifted high to place on shoulders. Riding joys of space. Beholders. Three kernels each hole: worm, crow, grow. Water summer whole. Harvest go. Two points make a line, call AB. Compass the point A, same the B. Circle-cross-circle two points be, call them C and D. Line CD across line AB, halving it perfectly.
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Before completing the Aristotle portion, I'd like to highlight in its own post an error concerning his view which I made in Part 1 of "A Cognitive Imagination." I said earlier that Aristotle proposed a cognitive imagination in which “the soul discriminates and is aware of something which exists” (DA 427a21–22), as do the powers of perception and thought. That is an inaccurate report of Aristotle. He writes: Aristotle’s cognitive imagination is a tool for the mind's discriminations and discovery of what is, but this power of imagination does not do those things, unlike perception and judgment. Additionally, I had implied previously that this power of cognitive imagination was not a genre of thought. Aristotle evidently regarded it as a type of thought. In calling it an Aristotelian cognitive imagination, I do not mean to ascribe to it of itself power for assessing truth or falsehood, which cognitive suggests. This power of imagination is a supporter of cognition in that sense, including cognition in geometry.
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The human brain stopped evolving (except for some small shrinkage) about 200,000 years ago. Human knowledge of the world and the kinds of social environments varied considerably over the succeeding years, and morals have taken on shapes fitting those stages of knowledge and social organization. The look of humans in the last century and into the future is surely going see some evolving of morals as the human mind remakes its powers over nature and remakes itself with advancing technology (e.g. in memory and communications). Offhand and speculatively, I'd think that human selves will continue in the setting of more advanced technology, and there will be alternatives for the ways selves behave towards selves, which is to say, the core of what I call morality will continue.
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One half hour from now: Livestream
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Welcome, Romulus. One is already with values inherent in life before one adds any chosen values. Come to a stage of development in which one adds chosen values, one could choose behaviors without knowing their consonance or dissonance with life of the human animal that one is. One's chosen behaviors need not wait on having a code of values, though so far as I know, children are taught codes of values or at least certain do and don't (brush your teeth; kneel by bed and say your prayer when getting in bed for night; don't play with matches; don't put dried peas in your nose). Rand crafted a code of values that aim to be consistent and unified between its values and between its virtues and unified with one's non-chosen values which came to one with life and its individual human development in a profoundly social setting. There is a mountain of reasons to choose to continue life in that tune. Choosing to continue one's life is implicit in one's choices for rational behavior. Rationality is the fundamental virtue Rand (and others before her) proposed. As I put it, in parallel with Mark, in the address of your issue in the links below: What good would it be to possess all one desired but lose one's rational mind? You Can Leave Your Hat On
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2025 "Election" of Incumbent Dictator in Progress
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In 1968 Ayn Rand wrote: “But even Humphrey looks like the remnant of a civilized past—like a decaying dowager who is ending her days in genteel poverty and clutching at musty mementos—when compared to the third candidate in this election: George C. Wallace. "I have said repeatedly that the ‘liberal’ welfare-statist movement in this country represents not socialism, but fascism—a hidden, disguised, unadmitted, implicit fascism. (See my article on ‘The New Fascism—Rule by Consensus’ 1965.) George Wallace represents the emergence of an open fascism in this country—or, more exactly, the crude elements from which an explicit fascism is to come. “Observe the symptoms: RACISM (which he denies, but which is quite obvious in his own utterances and in his past record)—a primitive, undefined NATIONALISM (not a rational patriotism, but nationalism in the form of a pseudo-self-esteem)—militant ANTI-INTELLECTUALITY (not an opposition to a specific group or kind of intellectual, but to all intellectuals, to the intellect as such)—the constant appeal to ‘the little people, or ‘the plain people’ or ‘us folks’ (which, socially, is an appeal to the lowest elements in society, and, psychologically, an appeal to an individual’s lowest potential: to self-righteous mediocrity)—and FORCE, the explicit and implicit reliance on the ‘activism’ of physical force as the solution to all social problems. . . . “It is the fact that some of his statements—apart from and out of HIS context—are true and needed saying that deludes many people into the belief that he is a defender of freedom or capitalism. Quite obviously, he is not. . . .” In the past, I have often referred to Trump and his MAGA faction as proto-fascist. That would be a faction such as Rand had described in 1968. However, I now think that faction evolved into something more decidedly fascist. Much window dressing with the American flag, but the old representation of the flag for a nation of individual liberty is now fading. The rights and legal equality won by Black Americans during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s are being suffocated by the newly elected LEADER in control of executive Departments. On every front, the new administration is deliberately moving the form of government here at the federal level to the fascist form. It is not merely making moves which, independently, will be picked up and put into the purpose of fascism. If you visit whitehouse. gov, you find it has been dumbed down to adulatory photos and vague pleasant slogans, not the long-standing repository of texts of presidential public speeches and other presidential remarks. The free and independent press is under continual threats from LEADER. Loss of individual rights and the release of his Brown Shirts from prison for their individual criminal actions in support of his continuing rule coddling White Supremacist propaganda is called freedom and justice by LEADER and his ideological circle. Other public smearing of individuals opposing HIM and Big Lie after Big Lie, and HIS use of presidential power to rewrite history of his crimes and crimes of his Shirts is daily faire. To the glee of millions of citizens. Since 1968, there were changes in the proto-fascist (now deliberate) faction. They took over the Republican Party and thereby could win more than the seven States won by Wallace. The so-called Moral Majority became a block in the party which candidates therein must placate to win a nomination. The Party winners pay empty lip service to rule by the constitution and the rule of law it enables, but support every push by LEADER to test overrunning what remains of legal restraints on HIM. Additionally, an excellent diagnosis already in 2019.
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This author on Aristotle and Mathematics is great. Henry Mendell's Making Sense of Aristotelian Demonstration is hard, but also great.
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6/19/24 1/24/25 “If you saw someone taking a 4-year-old into a house to murder him, and you stopped it, you would not be breaking the law. In fact, you would be doing wickedly to sit by and do nothing about it,” Boyd explained. “That is the righteous argument and should be the legal argument in a nation of law." If you called the law on 911 in such a case, the law would come to intervene and charge the attacker. If you called the law where abortion is legal when an abortion clinic is being blocked by vigilantes, they would be cleared and charged. That is a nation of law.