Boydstun

They certainly do replay on and on statements of Trump's taken out of context, and these are easily spotted. After all, we are not confined to television or radio. We can look up full remarks on the internet. Television does de-contexting with Trump's remark about being dictator for his first day in office. Serious business instead requires looking into specific plans he and his campaign team have lain out for what he would direct being done during his coming administration (assuming the practical conditions that he gets the nomination, gets more electoral votes than his Democratic opponent, and then does not have his actual edicts among those proposed overruled by the judiciary). We should look also into what "emergency powers" the Executive has; that facility is a regular step in states that have transitioned from democratic republic to dictatorship. As opposed to much of the political talk on television, we should take seriously the charges of prosecutors and the verdicts of juries or judges. Prosecution wins so often in the cases they bring, even with procedure stacked so heavily in favor of the accused, because prosecutors select for prosecution only cases which, with the evidence they have, are highly likely to result in conviction. Trump has been adjudicated in a civil trial to have committed a rape. That is something to be taken more seriously than mere allegations or talk on partisan television. It is not objective and not credible that every time a judge or jury rules against one's favored candidate or Party (what some of the Party imagines would be in the Party's interest) the decision was made due to outside pressure or bribery or political preferences. A judge recently ruled in Illinois that keeping Trump's name off the Primary ballot would be unconstitutional. To pass off the decision as simply favoritism towards Trump is not rational. The rule of law in this country is not a joke, not a farce, and not comprehensible to those who would rather talk about people than the ideas and reasoning in our legal system. Again, the most important case before the US Supreme Court last year halted a Republican Party effort to have State Legislatures have more power in deciding election outcomes.* Passing off the Court decision to the Court being against success of the Republican party would be plum ignorant. I don't think so. It seems there must be a focal event (such as the murder of MLK) or violence organized by organizations with a specific civil-disobedience or resistance-to-government purpose, focused by its leadership for a particular date of gathering (such as busting into the Capitol and busting its security staff on 6 January 2021, and a lot of those criminals are locked up, unavailable for a rerun). In a speech in Waco several months ago, candidate Trump urged supportive population in general to gather in New York on a court date he had coming up—gather and protest the legal proceedings against him or anyway such was going to happen spontaneously and with violence. Few, if any, showed in the street. Relatively few had shown up at his inauguration (I imagine too many were too frail with age for that sort of assembly.) Even with a Presidential candidate himself advocating or rationalizing or predicting violence over an unfavorable election outcome, I'd bet a Coke there will be civil order. Pro-Choice and anti-abortionists were vehemently opposed across decades, but there were only a few acts of violence (arson of abortion clinics). Overwhelmingly, people will stay here in this country and not commit violence, even under law they rate as highly unjust, to have a peaceful place under law to live.

Trump urging election fraud in Georgia I know people who supported Trump in 2016, but after such public displays of his illegal attempts to change vote counts (under a subjective faith, or at least a sales-front, "I won by a landslide"), they were not supporting him again. (That is not to say they are going to vote Democratic!) They told me that even before his indictment for illegal acts attempting to invert the results of the election. Naturally, I couldn't help but wonder why such a voter did not perceive salesman Trump back in 2016 as I thought obvious (and posted): a blowhard and con man. But there were other supporters, some parading themselves as Objectivists, who proved to be not such innocent supporters of Mr. Trump for President in 2016 and subsequently. These are the ones who relish his subjectivism and bold lies, which they repeat. Not simply falsehoods, but repeat as lies. I've not known them in person, but One of them I thought I knew a fair bit from online talk. As the Trump term in office unfolded, it turned out that there was nothing against the free market that Trump might do which One would not rationalize away. Then, it turned out (I learned from a long-time in-person friend) that One was in fact himself, of himself, the most deceitful online companion I'd happened into. Not that those depraved Trump ones are 100% in agreement with everything Trump says in public. They have some independent judgment on when an old lie should have been retold instead of Trump giving his honest commonsense take on something involving elections. When Trump gave a sensible look as to why Republicans did not pick up more seats in the Congress than they did in the 2022 election, these cohorts in viciousness and subjectivism would have none of it; rather, if their side lost some, it should be proclaimed as due to election fraud. Still, there is no indication yet of a bloc of voters willing to support candidates of such proclaimed autocratic ambitions as Trump's, but are candidates who are not connecting themselves personally to Trump. Because there are not fast principles or public-affairs policies distinctive to Mr. Trump (i.e., not just Republican principles and policies had without Trump), a lot of that depravity-faction will crawl back under the rocks as the personal Madoff-sunset is repeated for Mr. Trump. Should he win re-election this year, I remain confident that the judiciary upholding the continuance of our constitutional democratic republic and the substantial continued public support for that will block the maneuvers from Trump proto-fascism to fascism. (And between you and me and the fence post, I'd expect his first interest in winning presidential power this time is to try trumping any possible criminal convictions of him in judicial process.)

The Original Sham – Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 PS – Again, the original sham is that mortality is not naturally inherent in life. The idea of the natural as in contrast to the supernatural was unlikely to be an intelligible distinction for Moses and his tribes. I gather that our meaning to that distinction is a transfiguration of Aristotle's distinction of the sublunary world (natural) and the world beyond that, namely, the heavens (supernatural). The supernatural today does not mean that at all. As against the natural motion of a thrown baseball, Aristotle would have the catching of the ball as an intervention against the natural motion. So he did have a distinction of the natural trajectory as distinct from the artifice of the players catching the ball and powering it in a new natural trajectory back to his mate. The supernatural today is that sort of artificial, intelligent intervention, but by an invisible agent who in principle could redraft what are the natural trajectories among the plethora presented by geometry. Anyway, in the original sham in the Garden of Eden story, we should notice and add that all bad things—death, suffering, setbacks in production—are to be blamed on the humans. This blaming continues today, whether within a religious or a secular head: if there is a calamity, then it should be blamed on human behaviors. Some say that in such blaming, people are being impelled to conceive themselves as in more control of things than in fact they are. A hailstorm or a death in the family may well have been purely a course in nature. Humans or invisible engineers are not in control in what happened nor rightly to blame. That is, people are exaggerating what control they have, and in the same stroke, they are struggling to regain control and stabilize their course of life. I conjecture an additional reason humans so often fall into blaming themselves or other humans for natural calamities. They have some inkling of the Morality of Life, eventually found and articulated publicly by Rand, which says that right action is from the nature of life and that engaging in right actions supports life. They are often mistaken that their behavior caused the calamity, but their continuation of life with a renewed sense of holiness in the actions they will take might have at least a symbolic relationship to the truth, often subconscious, that is the Morality of Life.

Race for Small Nuclear Reactors

Here is the US House of Representatives doing as usual: NOT "I'll cut these expenditures, if you'll cut those." As usual, the opposite: "Let's keep buying votes from our different constituencies with taxpayer dollars, the fiscal responsibility be damned!" Baloney! Free lunches of baloney all around! Federal FY 2023 ended with a budget deficit of 1.7 trillion dollars. The federal government has spent $510 billion more than it has collected in fiscal year 2024. What is the House doing to attain a balanced budget in FY 2024? Nothing that I've heard of.

I submitted my hommage to Leonard Peikoff to the FB Leonard Peikoff Appreciation Group. They refused to post it. (They do not give reasons.) I have posted it verbatim at my own FB page here. As with the FB Ayn Rand Group, I mentioned above,* I've ended up leaving this FB group, holding itself out as friendly to Objectivism, as well. Happy that I am able to share my studies and writings on Objectivist philosophers, other philosophers, and their works here at Objectivism Online. I appreciate this forum and the intelligence and independence of its regular participants, and I appreciate what Leonard accomplished.

Bernanke's Analysis Austrian Look

I'd like to add a note to that Part. Aristotle's four causes and his teleology, good and bad in application, is treated by Leonard Peikoff in Lecture 5 of his 1972 lectures on the history of philosophy. Transcription of this portion is available in Founders of Western Philosophy – Thales to Hume (2023) on pages 187–91.

Petition for rehearing en banc by appellate court denied.

All Along Become some reason, then all along, beneath each chant, arch, trance, and tear, was known stop-still of life, the end, no more, no something, no place, no passage. (Sept. 2021)

This post is an hommage to Leonard Peikoff (b. 1933) for his contributions to the philosophy Objectivism. His biggest contribution of written work is his book OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND. His second most important written contribution is his essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD). This was published in THE OBJECTIVIST, a journal edited by Rand (d.1982) and N. Branden, in five installments from May to September of 1967. Peikoff was 33. (Those were the nominal dates of those issues of the journal; at times the journal was behind its target dates for publication.) ADS followed immediately Rand’s series “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” in that journal. Three years before ASD, Peikoff had completed his PhD dissertation THE STATUS OF THE LAW OF CONTRADICTION IN CLASSIC LOGICAL ONTOLOGISM at NYU. The only substantial supplement to Rand’s theory of concepts since ADS (and two papers by David Kelley in psychology of abstraction in the 80's) is my paper “Universals and Measurement” (2004), which addresses magnitude structure all the world must have if Rand’s model of concept structure is indeed applicable to all term-concepts. https://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php... I hope soon to complete an amplification and recasting of an issue raised within ASD: necessities in truths. I’d like here to recount my own personal sequence of events concerning Rand and Peikoff. I had been given THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED by a cousin-in-law S. Swift at Christmas 1966. I was a freshman in college. On the first page, the invitation page of ATLAS, beginning “What Moves the World?” Swift had written “Read The Fountainhead first.” On the title page for Part I of ATLAS, he had written “Let your actions be guided by rational choice", which was really good orientation I needed at that time. He had underlined the opening line of that novel. I carefully read them in the summer and fall of 1967. I was in a private mental hospital that summer I read THE FOUNTAINHEAD, and my doctor kept encouraging me to finish it. It saved my life, and thereafter I never again required psychiatric care. After those novels, I began reading Rand’s nonfiction books that were out at the time, and I read THE OBJECTIVIST, which was at my University library. Peikoff’s ASD introduced me to the Analytic-Synthetic distinction, and over my many years, I have studied its appearances in the history of philosophy and another distinction by that name in the history of mathematics. In second semester of my freshman year, I had my first course in philosophy, which was mainly an argued layout of all that is, by a Thomist professor, who was superb. He had been trained at the University of Cologne after WWII. But I did not learn of the A-S thread in philosophy until I read Peikoff’s essay on it. I continued to take philosophy courses in college—I minored in it—concluding in my final semester spring 1971 with a seminar on THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, under another superb professor, who was from India and who had been trained at the University of Gottingen. I pursued graduate studies three times in my life, once in physics, twice in philosophy. I had to withdraw for various reasons in all cases, but learned enormously from those studies. I am an independent and inveterate scholar. I had seen Ayn Rand on the Johnny Carson show at the home of my friend Swift. https://www.youtube.com/playlist... I did not see or hear Peikoff speak until about 1974, when I took a recorded lecture course of his on the history of modern philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/playlist... Very good. During that decade, I was working my way through Fredrick Copleston’s A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. Completed. I took Peikoff’s 1976 recorded lecture course THE PHILOSOPHY OF OBJECTIVISM when it was presented in Evanston, north of Chicago. That greatly renewed my enthusiasm for the philosophy as one of much width and depth. I read Peikoff’s THE OMINOUS PARALLELS when it came out in 1982. Five years later, Peikoff published his intellectual memoir “My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand” in THE OBJECTIVIST FORUM. I wrote him a letter thanking him for sharing that and telling him how eagerly I was looking forward to his book on Objectivism, stemming from his 1976 lectures, that he had been working on for some time. And how important I thought it was. He thanked me. In 1991 the book was issued—OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND. It is very fine, accessible to the general educated public, and indeed it proved very important to setting out the philosophy of Ayn Rand in a systematic and comprehensive way, as the philosophy had been developed by the end of her life. That book put Rand’s thought as a comprehensive philosophy more decisively pinned on the map of philosophy. Life accomplishment “as difficult as it is rare.” (This photo is Peikoff and Rand early in their association.)

I seriously question this. I've known lots of creative hardworking people, especially artists, who gave up their top-loved careers to earn a living or better standard of living, knowing full well that they would have only peripheral time for the studies or creation they most treasured. One is likely deceiving oneself if one thinks accomplishment of one's early dreams was dashed by the American political and legal circumstances. The failure is most often because there were competitors better at that work than oneself for filling the slots. I know that assessment about how good one is in some areas is foggy. I naturally write some amount of poetry. I never devoted any study or training or week-after-week effort on it. And I don't know that my products would be "better" if I had. It had not been a dream of mine to become a poet, a widely appreciated one (and I'm not widely appreciated for it). I'd say it is hard to make a good self-assessment of how good one is in some areas, such as that one. (Although, I seem to recall that Walter Scott gave up writing poetry upon reading some other poet.) But when it comes to becoming a concert pianist, for example, I think the comparison becomes clearer as to why one should withdraw from trying to fill one of those few slots there are for that skill. My dream was to become a physicist. I worked and worked, years of preparation, and sacrifice of all sorts of good things for the sake of making sure I was not derailed from staying in college and pursuing my mission. I failed at the graduate level. It was honestly because there were others much faster at learning the advanced physics and mathematics. I withdrew in an ocean of tears. In a while, I thought, "Well, at least one should have money." I found out what additional learning I needed to get a good-paying job in engineering. I got that second degree, and it worked out. I hated every hour I was in engineering school because it was not physics school. Making money after that, it turned out, left more time in after-commerce hours to study and create what I pleased than I'd previously had available in my scratching out a living in unskilled labor. (And even though in the engineering work, where we were scrambling to finish the last nuclear plant to be built in America, I could be working 60 hours a week!) I did not return to my former top-passion subject for learning in spare hours. I turned to my second, which was philosophy, in which I had minored in college. Thanks to my long life and my good company, I ended up in these golden years in the perfect study and writing environment and able to buy any book I need or desire and have it arrive at the front porch. When I first began to study philosophy in those after-work hours, after largely letting go of learning more physics or mathematics, it was high-class contemporary political philosophy. I enjoyed it, though I eventually shifted to other areas of philosophy, intensely, leaving political philosophy aside. I suggest that people who stop pursuing their original dream and take up study and action in political areas actually like it. It was a secondary for them all along. One reason Objectivist types might be drawn to blaming the government and the culture for the failure of their dreams is because of one aspect in the struggles of Howard Roark in Fountainhead. The only thing holding Roark back is social conflict, indeed social malevolence towards him. He has genius and the skill to fill the slot he eventually wins. Only bad character in society slows him down. Indeed, in both that novel and in Atlas, one will find only human sources of human pain and suffering and despair. That focus suits her chosen themes. But it is not all the factors in play in our real lives in the world of our time. Resilience and achievement of happiness even on losing one's top dream is a virtue in my book. It is possible, it's yours.

Monart, so bottom line, if I'm understanding you correctly: we are not in a position to know that anyone has proven (in the appropriate sense of the word proven) that a SARS-Covid virus exists? Not that we should conclude that it does not exist, only that we should not be concluding that it does exist? I am personally not in a position to know by the dispositive physical evidence that any virus of any sort exists. I don't even have a microscope, and the reports are that even that would not do the trick. I don't have time to learn all things from the fundamental evidence. (In my apartment, I did once check out for myself what Newton had reported one would observe concerning the shape of the water surface in his rotating bucket-of-water experiment. He told true, and indeed, it was only after my own demonstration that I could understand perfectly clearly what he had been describing.) There is much I count as science and scientific medicine I take for true because I've had some science education and have formed for myself some maps to most reliable sources for solid science reporting. I don't have the background training or willingness to invest my time in virus science to understand adequately what you or those guys mean. My scientific doctor advises I get such-and-such medicine to take for such-and-such potential or manifest physical problem. I pay everyone and do it. I credit researchers in microbiology, and research of big pharma, and my doctors with having pulled me back from death bearing down from infection by HIV, and I still follow the guidance of those physicians to keep me alive even while I have that infection. (No one was ever successful in developing a vaccine for that virus, and so far as I know, no one ever claimed that they had done so.) My closeness to research on that virus and its hideouts and mutations is not more than from reading my Scientific American. I never got Covid. I took the vaccines. They make me a little sick for a day, but then I'm fine. I'll stay with my past social lines to scientific truth and sources of expert advice. I'll continue to think that there is that Covid virus and that it is an air-borne transmission and take sensible precautions against it based on that relayed science.

Monart, are you saying these guys have it wrong? That you know they are wrong? We had a CDC when the Asian Flu hit in 1957-58 in the US. We knew it was coming in advance. A lab developed an effective vaccine. It was not being produced quickly enough to save many people, so Ike got funding for ramping up the rate. It hit children the most. In terms of today's US population, it resulted in the equivalence of about 200,000 deaths here. State and federal government did not opt to close schools. Many were closed by lack of attendance. If those governments had not ordered businesses closed during the Covid sweep, impact on family economies and the general economy would have been by private decisions and the course of nature, and there would have been no rationale for government to compensate people whom it had prohibited from production. Not that today most people think such a rationale is needed for a check from the Treasury. I scoured the New York Times archive for its coverage of the Asian Flu (Indonesia) pandemic in those years. It was little mentioned, and the main concern was that it not impact readiness of our military. The revolution in communications technology since then was surely a factor, I'd say, in the drastic difference in how the Times covered the two pandemics. I was able to monitor day by day whether a friend of mine in a federal prison in Ohio had died from his case of Covid by using this information resource as tipoff for further search (this map).

You can contact him here.

Not at all. I know nothing of objective correctness or incorrectness of the content of what I referred to as cultural brainwashing in childhood about a male or female sexual psychology. By using "brainwashing" I did not mean to put any negative valence on it, only an impressive strength of it. Sexual psychology with its purported differences as between psychology of men and women is more than simply what acts one likes to do, how one likes to appear, or whether one is more turned on by men or women in general. No, it is the sort of thing Branden wrote about, and the sort of thing we see in older films and in psychologies Rand puts into her characters. It's fine to put those psychologies into characters (and real children), but I think it is self-delusion to think you are just discerning and reinforcing a fact deriving from human biology. (This reminds me of how Murray Rothbard would try to pass off as natural rights, such as right specifications for ownership in land, that actually are rights shot through with inherited social conventions. Nothing wrong with such rights, only with the blindness or deception.) The culture, no culture, commits a crime in implanting a predominate sexual psychology in the children. (I doubt the government has to be much involved except by way of protecting individual human rights.) And the idea that one or another or another, and always only one simple one, is simply on account of one's biological development is, I conjecture, the usual situation of people wanting the world and themselves to be simpler than they really are. That's most of any population. I have gathered, Tad, that you have not personally known anyone who is transexual, and you seem to have only a politics-sourced and -framed view of them, pretty distant from those real persons. I don't know a great deal about the subject, what I have conveyed does not seem much gotten by you or helpful to you, and it's not where I should be giving my attention. So I hope we can stop this tangent soon, interesting as it might be of itself at the level of beer-talk. Our political priorities, anyway, should be on who among candidates thinks what about the brazen State violation of the individual rights of women going on, the federal budgets in the red, (and as Jon has raised) who is a warmonger or a Chamberlain, who will or will not continue the upgrade of our nuclear defense, who will or will not subsidize or bail out private businesses . . . .

Well, yes, it is an evasion, and a repression requiring continual reinforcement that has been going on since one understood that we each die. My picture is that all people live under a terror of death once they learn solidly that each life ends. And it looks to me that an awful lot of people's behavior should be looked at as how they are responding, how they are carrying on, under that terror. How do they skirt around their eventual (or imminent) absolute annihilation? Or perhaps they face it squarely, brutally honestly, as I do. I've endured deaths of quite a few loved ones and family members (starting during the American war in Vietnam). I lived under a specific death-expectation horizon (2-year) myself for many years. I was with my first life-partner when he died, and I think about when I or my husband die and the other is left alone. I think about it squarely, and although some of my poetry is about death, there is no skirting it there either. I gather that not all religions are such a blatant skirt-around of death as Christianity. My conjecture is that all of them are importantly, if not wholly, about that mental coverup and relief. My relief is by getting as much correct setting of death in mind as possible, including not only recognizing that it is end of existence, but end of specific fundamental categories of existents. Sort of like cleaning better and better any stowaway remnants of existents and our conscious experience lurking in one's head in conceiving death. Rand apparently thought about her own death as ending of the world. I don't much like that perspective, even as some sort of metaphor. I keep my eyes set on the world as it continues beyond my death, not on me going out; set on the continuing existents, especially the human world, which is what I most cherish; then too, on where I got to in my work and remember my dear ones. Clearly, Rand didn't always think of her death that world-ending way; she prepared best she could to have her work remain a mark in the world after her life and find minds who would respond to it as others of us did while she was alive. The social element I notice in one's mind encountering the world has a spring for belief in spirits beyond nature, and this is not the social element Rand stressed in her 1957 composition concerning mystics of spirit. My take is here.

When I first met the transexual who became our friend, his transformation had been completed. He just seemed like a man. He looks that way in facial hair patterns, and sounds that way in voice. He moves like a man. If told he was formerly a woman and you started looking for physical traces of that, I'd notice the fairly wide hips for a man. I have not checked out the thinness of his wrists. I have not seen him unclothed, and I don't know how the density of his muscle feels. I found a little online about the physical changes from woman–>man, and you may find more: I enjoy being a boy. I've always been glad I was not a girl. In 2000 it was discovered that I had severe osteoporosis, and very likely I had it back 6 years to when I had broken a leg just by twisting it at age 46. The specialist at U of C told my doc to check level of free testosterone, doc did, and I was low (maybe plum out—I don't recall). So doc prescribed this testosterone gel you rub on your chest. Libido born again. I bet it has that salutary effect on straight guys also. Doc took me off of it when some patients started having some heart problems, but I think other docs are not so cautious as that and still prescribe it. Tell them Boydstun testified that it can have a very good effect on you.

Chapter 11 of John Richardson's Nietzsche's Values (Oxford 2020) is titled "Creating – Founding New Social Norms." Therein he writes: It is pleasing to me to see this scholar taking notice of a big difference between Nietzsche and Rand complementing my treatment of it in "Locomotive Rand v. Nietzsche." But what I'd like to draw attention to for this thread is that in print an established professional academic philosopher (besides Rand-friendly Lester Hunt [Chapter 14] and Rand-devotee ones) should mention Rand at all. Ever since The Fountainhead and the film of it made a splash, there has been popular press simply identifying Rand with Nietzsche by a superficial association (for political smear): individualist-egoist, Roark-Superman, Nietzsche rerun, fascist. But the academic stand has been as in the book American Nietzsche (2012): do not mention the existence of Ayn Rand. Richardson's natural mention of Rand merits a hat-tip.

NATO NATO Nuclear Deterrence

The facts about Manning are physical facts of his surgery, hormone injections, and consequent changes in its body. Also, its facts of action as charged in his criminal conviction. The facts in the charges against Assange will be determined by a jury from the evidence. Those facts are whatever they are already, but they will not be accepted legally unless he is convicted. We have designed that legal determination process such that some guilty people will be judged Not Guilty even though the alleged facts of the case as brought by the prosecution are indeed the facts of reality; so that fewer innocent people will be wrongly found guilty. Persons who have their sex changed by surgery and hormones are not the same as someone who senses they are psychologically a different sex without such a physical-alteration project (I'm not entirely convinced there are any such things as male versus female sexual psychologies, such as put about by Rand and Branden, that are independent of brainwashing of the children by the culture, i.e., there may well be no such distinct psychologies that are purely an outcome of biological nature). In official government documents, I'd think the proper pronoun or salutation for them is just as for those us who don't feel that way. Manning is in a different category: the category of having undergone the medical, physical alteration, last I heard. There is a marble sculpture of old of an hermaphrodite, which turns my stomach. Also, I dislike drag queenery. But the circumstance that such matters are top political issues for voters grossed out by such sculpture or human behaviors is bad for the future of our country. Such cultural issues promoted to political hay have gotten way out of proportion in comparison to the circumstances that people are having to pay so much for groceries or are having their life savings stolen due to government-driven inflation or, as could come in the future if the federal budgets in the red are not stopped, police protection and armed forces can no longer be paid.

From Oxford: The Undivided Self What's the Use of Philosophy?

From Cambridge: The Critique of Judgment and the Unity of Kant's Critical System

From Springer Nature: Identity and Indiscernibility in Quantum Mechanics

From Brill: Time Is a Plant