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y_feldblum

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Everything posted by y_feldblum

  1. R, I have no argument against you being interested in a book of your choosing. But why are you shocked that others might not be? Again, you expect something of others which you have no right to expect. Neither Dr. Kelly's academic record nor his history with Objectivism, nor even his biography, is material to why one ought to read his book. What is it about the book itself? Is it, in fact, an excellent book on the subject? Or can it only boast of its author's name and credentials? Suppose I express to you my appreciation of great movies and my deep interest in seeing those I have not yet seen or heard of. You then tell me of a movie made by a famous director who has made plenty of great movies in the past, with some major stars who have been very good in other films. I tell you I have as yet no interest in seeing it, and nothing you have said has been material in convincing me I ought to be interested. Why am I right, and why would your insistence that the artists' credentials are reason enough to see the film be nonsense in the context of what my interests are?
  2. R asked "Why wouldn't proposition X be true?" without offering a positive reason for it to be true; rather, he assumed without evidence that positive proposition X was true, found it wasn't, and was shocked. To answer his question requires previously provided evidence; as such, his question cannot be properly answered except with rhetoric or someone pointing out the flaw. Why wouldn't any great-movie fan be interested in watching and evaluating what the the director thought was a great movie?
  3. Concepts are human inventions - the "essence" of soup is not an entity in this world, though there are many entities which are soup. The question should have been - what kind of thing is ownership, ie entity or relationship, and do there exist any real-world instances of the concept? The answer to which is relationship, and very many. The question may have been meant to be - does the existence of ownership affect men, and if so how and to what extent? The answer to which is yes, by enabling him to survive as a rational animal, and fully.
  4. The 14th amendment has absolutely nothing to do with taxes and it is impossible to construe it as having anything to do with them. The constitutionality of certain taxes or others hinges on other parts of the Constitution. Under the Constitution and the first 15 Amendments, the only lawful federal tax was a tax levied on the various states in proportion to their populations. The 16th Amendment legalized the feds taxing incomes directly. That income taxes with whatever progression are constitutional a) has nothing to with Amendment 14 has everything to do with Amendment 16
  5. Employee taxes are voluntary in that you are not forced to hire anyone! Who specifically pays taxes on a certain sum does not change the fact that both parties know what the tax is, or the amounts that the one pays pretax and the other receives posttax. Taxes at all are involuntary - at the very least insofar as they are an involuntary barrier to one's most profitable activity and a compulsory redirection to less efficient, profitable, enjoyable etc alternatives. Until the 16th Amendment, individual taxation by the Federal government was unconstitutional. Congress used to raise a capitation / direct tax on the states in proportion to their populations. By definition, direct taxes were supposed to be "uniform throughout the land"; the Constitution had to make that clear only regarding duties, imposts, and excises (1.8). The uniformity of the head tax was of the flat kind - not flat-rate, and certainly not progressive. That kind of tax is in fact the least immoral kind - not the sales tax.
  6. Daniel, The difference is in rights - as soon as one claims they are not an inherent universal absolute, one has none (one can claim a thing merely as a privelege revokable, which means revokable at any time by others). The university professors claim debts against the lives of taxpayers and is therefore a moral criminal; the rational scholarship candidate claims "public property", which really means "that which by rights any and all have a claim to", and is there morally clean. The former claims your life; the latter claims something nobody owns. Yes, the number of bills and the colorful patterns printed on them may in fact be the same in both cases: it is the content and context of the claims by which one judges.
  7. Willing acceptance of money the government taxed (stole) on your behalf is a moral crime. (Although reclaiming money from the government which it had no right to take from you in the first place is not.)
  8. I just read a couple of letters to Rand and Objectivists claiming to prove the floating-abstractness of the Objectivist government and doing so well enough. However, they are based on the assumption that exercise of the right to self-defense can be an economic activity. The opposite is the case: there is no such thing as economic activity without the guarantee of rights. Economic activity is the relationship between two or more men - rational animals - which we call "society". Without reason, neither society nor economic activity exist, and slavery is all that is left. Witness the difference between ants and bees, slaves in all ways to the queen, and the highest of animals - those which have a very limited capability to reason and a very limited system resembling (but in no way comparable to) rights -, such as dolphins, apes, etc. These highest of species engage voluntarily in mutually beneficial social activity, albeit without much in the way of production. The animals' system works because there is the convention of something-resembling-rights. Men, however, cannot exist qua man - by producing - without the absolute precondition of rights guaranteed. Men cannot produce self-defense as an economic activity without the prior condition that defense is guaranteed. Men can produce food without a prior guarantee of food, but they cannot produce the guarantee of rights without the prior guarantee of rights. One letter gave the example that the victim of some crime could purchase the services of a defense corp to right the injury. What if he cannot? The guarantee of rights is the precondition to rational existence. Where rights are not guaranteed, existence qua man is impossible. The ability to purchase something is not a guarantee of rights and does not fulfill the necessary condition for rational existence. Ayn Rand was right when she said that moral government - a limited, checked, and constitutional republic, based on objective ethical principles and whose only function is to guarantee individual rights - is necessary.
  9. About when I became interested in Objectivism, a couple of months ago, I fell for heavy metal - especially of the Swedish "Gothenburg Sound" sort, aka melodic death: for its beauty, power, edge, and sheer aggressiveness. I haven't much else to say, so I'll just list band names. Adagio; Apocalyptica; Arch Enemy; Children of Bodom; Dark Tranquillity; In Flames; Lacuna Coil; Metallica; Nightwish; Opeth; Symphony X. I'm slowly expanding my collection, artist by artist. I am sort of a completist, having to have every release from any particular artist. I have a rather long list of artists I would like to explore (or memorize). BTW - For anybody into Metallica, by which I mean into their earlier albums, I would recommend Apocalyptica and their first cover album Plays Metallica By Four Cellos.
  10. Capleton, I believe CF contested my wording on what appears to me to be a technicality - when sexuality develops. I said "people are born heterosexual" when in reality, as CF points out, people are born not sexual - or asexual - but are biologically programmed to develop sexually at puberty in a specific manner: heterosexually. People can learn to override their natural functions: they can learn to regulate - hack, if you will - breathing, heart rate, states of consciousness, and that which is called sexual orientation. One is not born able consciously to slow his heart at will, and one is not born programmed to develop homosexually.
  11. M0zart, I was responding to Trey before, and as such was speaking about the origin of "sexual orientation" - whether natural or learned. I did not explicitly mention whether homosexuality is moral or immoral. You cannot take a statistic among people and then elevate it to a necessary fact of nature based on evolution. Just because approximately 10% of people in America live below the poverty line does not mean it is necessarily based in the nature of men. Likewise, homosexuality, no matter the constant percentage in this country, is not necessarily genetic. It may be learned, and it is my contention that it is. Ie, people are born heterosexual, yet there are some who learn to switch their orientation later in life, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by their own choice or by others without their knowledge. Nowhere do I make or imply the assumption "that human beings are exactly the same from generation to generation," and nowhere does my contention imply it. My point in my last comment, "strangely enough...," was to counter your implication in "we [do not] owe servitude to our natural processes" that humans can somehow override nature as mystics and subjectivists and collectivists claim.
  12. It is perfectly ethical to take up the offer. It is immoral to live a contradiction. Supporting taxation implies that one thinks there is no such thing as an absolute right to property. Taking up the offer implies that one thinks that the absolute right to property does exist and is in full effect. Since the absolute right to property exists objectively and is independent of whether people believe in it or not, if she recognizes reality she may take the money. The government has no right to any money which it has taxed (stolen) from its citizenry - only that money freely given to it. The person who has not earned a dime of it has more right to it. She should take it. Disclaimer: I saw something like that opinion on this forum; I am by no means knowledgable in the philosophy. One of those class A geeks currently studying Aristotle in Greek can offer a better answer in more detail.
  13. Which seems entirely irrelevant from a moral perspective Every is implies an ought. Who designed them to act in any particular way? Nature. Does this include how homosexuals learned to act? Most people eat; it is the most natural way to fulfill the natural urge of hunger. Some take nutrition directly through IV; it is not the natural way. This is essentially a list for ethics, and the contention from at least one poster was that fulfilling your desires and seeking your happiness wasn't the only thing that you needed to pursue in Objectivist ethics. Seeking one's happiness in the method proper to Man is the good and the purpose of life in Objectivist ethics. It assumes that we owe servitude to our natural processes, even if they produce unhappy results or make heavy demands on our own pursuit of happiness. Strangely enough, we owe servitude to the notion of rights, though they make me the evil in seizing other people's property with my rather large gang.
  14. I think I scent the Argument From Intimidation, m0zart. Billions of years ago the two sexes evolved, and since then nearly all but the lowest species have evolved to mate one sex with the other. It is in the nature of and is a benefit for perceiving animal to be physically attracted to, enough to copulate with, only the opposite sex. Heterosexual desire as such is a natural life-enhancing phenomenon. Homosexual desire as such does not come from nature. Desire for pleasure does, but homosexuality comes nurturally, from what one learns. Nature has not designed the various species to support it. There is no fundamental difference in how homosexuals and heterosexuals were designed to act, but only in how they learned to act. Trey, there have been many scientific studies supporting this contention as well. There have been many scientific studies claiming the Earth's environment is going to hell, and there have been many claiming not. The evidence for both natural homosexuality and supporting Kyoto is shaky at best. Given present scientific profisciency, I am surprised you are not surprised a "homosexual gene" hasn't yet been discovered.
  15. Rights are moral principles sanctioning freedom of action in a social context (AR). They are a necessary precondition for Man to exist qua man - as a rational animal. Where qua man is the good, is recognized as such, and is followed, man exists qua man; where not, not. As such, rights are inherent in the nature of Man. Being inherent, it directly follows that they are inalienable in, universal to, and equitable among all men. Any supposed right that is denied to some people, that can be seized from some people, or that is applied unequally to some people, is not a right but some other kind of privilege, perhaps legal sanction, perhaps sanction of the crime syndicate. In violating another person's rights, one in effect rejects morality in totality and cannot claim it in defense of himself; he denies that what he violated is not universal by denying it even to one peron - ergo, he claims that what he violated is not a right, and that there are no rights. In reality, the rights are merely violated, not removed; but the violator has given up any claim to the sanction of morality. That is the nature of forfeiting one's own rights. Slavery is simply existence not qua man. As a slave, one does not think and one does not follow his own mind and his own faculty of reason; one merely follows the dictates of some other master, be it species-inherited instinct or another man. To differentiate from Homo sapiens, the precursor species Homo erectus was a slave: it did not exist qua man. Voluntary slavery is by definition giving up the only thing that makes one human. It is suicide, but worse. Enforced slavery is a slow attempt to murder a person as well, a process of eroding his ability to act of his own will, to exist by his own mind, to be Man qua man. Of course it is immoral. Voluntary slavery is perfectly possible: one need only move to the jungle and proceed to immitate the apes. However, voluntary slavery while keeping the mind intact is impossible. Giving up one's freedom to act forces one to give up his freedom to think. As said, it flies in the face of identity: one cannot exist qua man after giving up existence qua man. "Voluntary debt" of the entire product of one's mind for any specified period of time is by definition complete and utter slavery for that time. One cannot exist as a rational animal without existing by being a rational animal - by consuming the product of his own mind - and so one cannot pretend to exist qua man for the duration of the servitude. As such, if one "wants out", he has been reneging on his debt the entire time by not abdicating his humanity and has been alive in secret, always thinking and acting by his own mind. It is like trying to commit suicide continuously for twenty years and playing dead whenever anyone walked into the room, and then waking up and deciding that "hey, it just wasn't worth it." It may be possible to die metaphysically for a specified period of time while the body stays alive, and then to be reborn metaphysically into the same body - ie, to be a slave for a specific period of time. But during that time, it is physically impossible to think "hey, I want out." One cannot sign a contract for the entire product of his mind for a duration of time and expect both to follow it and remain metaphysically alive. One of course can sign a contract for a specified and delimited product, such as for a hundred shipments of a good or for a medical service. In answer to your question, complete servitude (ie giving up the entire product of one's mind, or slavery) is possible. Only, one ceases being human.
  16. I'm imagining. You supposedly got my number right. Unless we all share numbers beforehand, as far as I am concerned you got only my number right and all the others wrong. If we do share numbers beforehand, that is perhaps how you knew them. Asking an Objectivist to convince himself of the truth of a proposition he has no way of validating, no evidence in support of it, and no reason at all to suppose is not the best way to use one's time. My supposed reaction would be: what trick did you use to discover my number?
  17. In this context, it would only be applicable for a 'gold standard' economy, not our current fiat money economy. We're already assuming that government only exists to provide defense, police, and justice. nothing prevents the government from hiring gold miners to mine gold for the national treasury Except for our assumption above and the fact that such constitutes partial nationlization of an industry.
  18. To live a man must work To live a man must produce - ie, create.
  19. choosing to think about something evil is morally questionable Why? If you catch a person in the act of murder and save the victim, then the person is still guilty of an intent to kill Intent to ... means provably has taken steps to but has not yet succeeded in .... Intent is not thought, but partial action. All actions are subject to moral judgment, but this doesn't necessarily lead to an equivalent statement about thoughts. If a man is brainwashed to think and do evil then the actions such a person takes are not his own choice, because he did not choose to be brainwashed, and he is not morally guilty of them. Such a thing is no longer a man. If there was a way to monitor inner thoughts, then would it be right to punish people if you monitored constant thoughts of child molestation in their brain, and even an intention to commit the act? If there was a way to monitor the books a person read, then would it be right to punish people if they only read millions of books on building bombs, or is provable intent to blow up a crowd necessary too? do children have rights not to be thought of in a sexual way by adults? If so, then that would give me sanction to monitor men's minds in order to guarantee this right is not violated. No, but all people have the right not to be molested in any way by anybody. Therefore, there is no sanction for Big Brotherhood.
  20. If object A exists because person P directly experiences it, what happens if person Q experiences the exact opposite, or non-A? The object exists and doesn't exist at the same time. If the definition of existence we are using here is valid for all observers - ie, if a thing exists for one person then it exists for all - then we have a contradiction and the claim is invalid. Otherwise, we cannot use the term exist, because that term implies objectively, without reference to any specific observer, and the claim is invalid.
  21. Ash, If you're claiming that "randomness" is not a relative term, but pertains to the identity of the entity, wouldn't that claim amount to saying that that entity was in some respect non-causal? My own definition for random is not deterministic, ie one cannot predict it with infinite precision simply by knowing a previous state of the entire universe to infinite precision and doing a lot of very complex calculations. A thing which is not deterministic still obeys identity and causality, however. I could take Matt's definition, with respect to the universe, only using determinism instead of causality in the definition. Andrew, the universe can never repeat itself - a premise which comes from a number of physical laws -, but I will probably be banned if I go into any more detail.
  22. I cannot speak to exactly what the mind is, except it is the capacity within any animal responsible for perception and the higher orders of consciousness. Hypothesizing the end of the mind via the method of its creation is fun, but pointless. The capability of reason within the mind is the capability of abstracting from perceptions, thinking and planning abstractly, and concretizing one's thoughts. If humans do such, they have the capability to think with reason; if not, not. Whether no or yes a human thinks with reason is: a choice between evasion of fact or acceptance and action based on it; and a choice between destruction of oneself and one's surroundings or the morality of active sustenance of one's own life. If humans have the capability to think with reason, and if at least some humans do not evade reality and instead act to sustain themselves, then humans certainly think rationally. Such is very easy to test, simply by looking at one's surroundings - and I conclude that humans certainly think rationally.
  23. "Rationality" is a thing which describes the mind. Can the universe be rational - or does it just exist and it is up to us to act in accordance with our mind and capability of reason? Rationality regarding the mind would mean, in essence, non-evasion of fact and, and objectivistically, the morality of active sustenance of one's own life. Physical order simply means a degree of non-continuum, is a thing independent of the mind, and arises spontaneously in accordance with the laws of nature.
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