[Rights of severely mentally ill]

The right to life is determined by an ability to conceptualize and reify one's environment. It follows that the mentally retarded and psychologically ill would still have that right, as neither condition precludes sapience. Someone in a Persistent Vegetative State with no hope of recovery wouldn't have an inalienable right to life because their state of being precludes sapience. More than likely, they would subsist on the mercy and will of their guardian, or on the charity of others. Ending such a person's life without the expressed permission of their guardian would be immoral.

[Obama comments on Ayn Rand in Rolling Stone]

Amazingly, that vague spout of nonsense conveys a complete misunderstanding of even elementary Objectivist principles.

[What would be Ayn Rand's position on Psychiatry?]

No, I'm not arguing that there is no such thing as an auditory hallucination. I just think it's important to identify exactly what it is that an auditory hallucination (or any other kind of hallucination) refers to. I myself am not certain.

When someone does something really horrible, there's an incentive to deny responsibility for what they've done, to avoid the consequences. When I hear that someone has murdered someone or several others and they claim that God told them to do it, I do not believe them — I do not believe that they heard God (there is no God to hear), and I do not believe they they heard any other "voice" that ordered them do do so. My view is that they chose to do what they did.

By definition, a delusion is any type of false notion. By definition, a hallucination is a delusion that would appear perceptible. Obviously, these are very broad definitions which could be interpreted to mean seeing things from the corner of one's eye, hearing subtle sounds, or just thinking anything falsifiable; however, the distinction's applied to one's mental status, and how well it corresponds to reality. In this case, "seeing" jet-pack toting panda bear-tigers does not correspond to reality; believing that a twenty-thousand year old insect instructs you to kill people and consume their flesh does not correspond to reality, either. When applying such examples as these for evaluation of one's mental status, the psychiatrist must assess how consistent are these thoughts. One could hardly call a Scientologist insane just because, however, a "Scientologist" instructed by Xenu to blow-up a hospital filled with blasphemers almost certainly is.

I think the issue some have with Psychiatry, Psychology, and other mental academics is that there isn't a really concrete line between what's normal, and what isn't: What defines a normal train of thought? As opposed to abnormal? Is one insane because of one hallucination, or several, or chronic ones over periods of years? These are all valid inquiries, true, but the trick is--being redundant--to evaluate how consistently these thoughts are applied.

[What error of cognition causes pepole to blame problems caused by gove]

Or more generally, it could simply be a rejection of reality. Most people are mentally conservative. That is, most individuals cling to ideas they find favorable, and deny, to varying degrees, subversive ideas. And, when ingrained from birth the nobleness of government, that sharing--for its own sake--is a virtue, and that individuals owe society in some form, is it really a surprise that such a large faction of people would become "Leftist?"

Of course, Hollywood, historical depictions of labor unions, corporations, and the like don't certainly improve the situation.

["Moshing" at concerts]

It is not morally wrong of you to "mosh" if you expect to gain something of value from the activity. Obviously, if you're simply engaging for the sake of engaging, or you feel compelled, then it would be morally wrong. However, I don't think it's particularly prudent of you to jump into a barely-conscious crowd with the intent of aggregation.

[Morality of killing a politician who's violating rights]

Is it moral to kill a polician who works to violate peoples' rights?

I suppose the proper answer to this question would involve extremity of action. In fact, context does matter when assessing a situation and deciding whether or not to apply a given conclusion. If she endorses simple (conservative) democrat policies, not true Socialism, then retribution a la death isn't a justified course of action. If, however, she endorses containment units, oppression through expression in all forms life, artificial population control methods, etc., then I'd argue that death might be preferable.

Now, if the subtext of your question were, "Why should certain punishments exist," I'd be happy to discuss.

[Democratically Student-run schools]

I'm assuming the success they meant is getting into college, but even still, the idea was very vague. I would think that the reason there is ANY amount of "success" is because the parents seem to be well-educated (although, to send kids to a school like this is quite stupid), so the kids might still manage conceptual development from parental guidance and encouragement. The only possible good here is that students are not a victim of standard public schooling which, though that is only replaced with non-education. Not a viable alternative, and equally destructive to the minds of children.

I disagree, partially. Albeit taught in a non-rigorous manner, if these children were exposed to public education, they would at least learn something, anything. Among others, skills necessary to survive in this modern day. As you observed, they probably are receiving some education from their parents, but how much, and how comprehensive? Ideally they would attend a magnate school.

[Democratically Student-run schools]

Late response here.

This is probably the most ineffective method of instructing children. Schooling as a service primary function should be to equip future adults with the tools necessary to obtain a job, provide a solid, rational philosophical background, and enforce some amount of socialization (it isn't particularly prudent to attach social zombies to your institution). Period. Foregoing the former two in favor of just socialization produces nothing of value to society. What good is someone if they can only run a "democratic society?" Further adding to the absurdity, the officials of this abomination of logic claim "remarkable success" from their methods. Not success in traditional subjects--Math, English/Language, Science, History/Social Sciences--but in some dubious, ambiguous concept. If this continues, which it probably will seeing as how these "new-age" methods are being increasingly proliferated throughout the media, these children will be mental stumps: incapable of reasoning in the traditional subjects, incapable of determining the benefits from the negatives from a given situation, and unable to determine a background.

This is far worse than any "education" that even the worst of public schools could provide.

[The Consequences of Public Education]

I apologize for stating the obvious, but the accepted assumptions were only to point to the unconfortable fact that you are an idiot. You are not alone in that. We are all in the same boat. Some of us advance in some or more areas on our own, but are still left intellectually de-capacitated. In the discussion on Harriman's Logical Leap, it came out that some posters knew the easy error that Harriman made regarding projectile motion because as children we had the same book on physics. A kid's book from 1966 explained to us what others did not learn in a college physics class.

As the poster above me stated, you're conflating idiocy with wisdom, not intelligence (or lack thereof). Stop it.

You do not think it is a big deal that the word "coin" has been hijacked by the government. You find no contradiction in people who buy and sell gold and silver advocating that the government adopt a gold standard so that "we" could have a stable currency. Yet, you probably claim to have read Francisco's "Money Speech." You do not connect these. Your formative years left you mentally atrophied. You think that everyone else suffered from collectivist education, but you escaped. And so you suggest that we discuss which of two unreal alternatives is the best way to fix the system, rather than asking what (if anything) any of us did to fix ourselves so that you could overcome your handicap. That is a another consequence of public education: you pursue political solutions to personal problems.

You enjoy bloviating (not spelled incorrectly) about the most irrelevant of topics, don't you?

"We" are not in the "same boat." "You" are simply projecting your own educational inadequacies unto "us." I recommend that if "you" feel dismayed by "your" educational attainment, "you" do something about it. Don't convey this upon "everyone", conflate fact with assumption, and be on your merry way.

Further, politics present adequate solutions to political problems, especially ones facing an entire globe.

[The Consequences of Public Education]

That is an interesting reply. You learned in public school (parochial school; nominally "private" school staffed with state-licensed teachers) that discussion is debate; that the road to truth is the hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Your school might have had a debate club where kids competed against other schools as in a zero-sum game like football - "Resolved: capital punishment should be abolished. Speaking for the affirmative..." So we have forums like these where someone says something and all those agree say nothing in reply.

Instead, you might reply with a case in point from your own experience verifying the initial claim. You might point to a logical conclusion, known to be truth, that follows independently from the original claim.

There's hardly a reason to.

My primary hobby, and a source of income for me, is numismatics. It is an unregulated market where people buy and sell money. Yet, I often meet numismatists who are ignorant of economics. They never learned it in school, for sure. For example, it is commonly assumed that the government is not just the actual source of money today, but morally, the only source. In the hobby of numismatics, in order to sell a "coin" the object must meet certain criteria, issuance from a government being primary. Anything else -- anything less -- is a token. The print publications will not take an advertisement that "misrepresents" tokens as coins: coins of Major League Baseball; coins of Disneyland; NFL Referee's Coin; etc. I have been arguing the point for 15 years. It is just another example of how public education has made us idiots. We are like the characters in Anthem, grateful to the collective for candles.

Random nonsense.

What bright spots exist come from the actual (though accidental) application of objective morality. Perhaps the primary reason that American universities attract scholars and researchers from all over the world is that we have no national system of university education: Michigan State University competes against Ohio State University and they both compete against Stanford and Harvard and so on.

The crisis in the lower grades K-12 comes from the lack of competition. But external competition is not a silver bullet. Schools should be "education malls" where teachers lease classrooms and other services and sell their teaching in open competition. At root, perhaps, is the very idea that children are incapable of productive work and, (perhaps the seed) that they should be protected from it.

Again, there is very little discussion to be had. You summarized the topic nicely, "The crisis in the lower grades K-12 comes from the lack of competition." That's almost self-explanatory: If you remove the incentive for higher-performing teaches to remain consistent via across-the-board salaries, and if you remove the incentive for higher-performing students to remain active and diligent in their studies via "NCLB," and if you remove the incentive for individual schools to teach not strictly to tests via standardized testing, then, why exactly would you expect competition, or incentive, to exist among those parties? None of which requires the elucidation of this thread.

A better topic would ruminate about the merits of instantaneous vs incremental instrumentation of privatized schooling, not simply highlight a well-known, and equally regurgitated issue.

[The Consequences of Public Education]

I don't understand what the topic of discussion is. Are we, the readers, simply here to agree with your assessment of the public-schooling system?

That is, what form of debate could derive from anything you just said?