It would seem that the left still enjoys painting Rand and Objectivists as giggling baby-eaters. A recent spate of disinformation pieces have been circling the internet here and here. The basic gist is that they drop context on some lines taken out of Ayn Rand's personal journals in which she comments on the William Hickman kidnapping murder of a young girl in the 1920s. It's funny too, because they're really just plagiarizing the same drivel that was passed about a few years ago with an 2005 article here. The response should be the same as the response it got then...click the big red x in the upper right of the window. A brief discussion on the Objectivism Online Forum should help clarify how the argument is specious. I've included a link to that discussion here.
I quote the very eloquent summation of one poster, Dismuke:
"To summarize - that article drops several bits of very important context.
1. The fact that the journal entries were PRIVATE, not intended for publication and, therefore, the contents were not written for the purpose of being objective to any audience other than Ayn Rand's own eyes.
2. The entirety of Ayn Rand's explicit philosophy which was consistent across volumes of works written over the span of many decades - including her philosophy's contempt for those who initiate force.
3. The fact that Ayn Rand herself dismissed it all as probable "idealizing."
4. The fact that, Ayn Rand, unlike the author of the article, did not equate self-interest with "walking across corpses" and, therefore, did not regard an out-of-context admiration for certain attributes of a brutal murderer's statements and demeanor as having possible negative implications for a morality of self-interest worthy of giving serious consideration to in the mental exercise the journal entry documents.
Now, if someone who was very familiar with the William Hickman case but had never heard of Ayn Rand before somehow stumbled across that particular journal entry, I can fully understand why he might properly conclude that Ayn Rand must have been some sort of strange, sociopathic kook not worthy of looking into further. But the author of that article very clearly IS familiar with the larger context of Ayn Rand's work and her personal history - so my conclusion is the article is nothing more than a cheap and sleazy "hit piece" designed to smear Objectivism. Don't be too surprised if it is embraced by the likes of David Kelley and Barbara Branden as more "proof" that Ayn Rand was indeed nothing more than a malevolent neurotic kook who somehow, nevertheless, managed to make a few good philosophical points here and there."
I can't think of anything more to add to this, except to express my sincere hope that trash like this will stop popping up in the news results for Rand on the right side of this blog. It is increasingly clear that the Left has no rational refutation of Rand's philosophy and can only resort to character assassination and ad hominem flubbery. Context is everything. ANY quote taken out of context can be read to mean anything you want it to. That is why the process of contextualization is so important in all written forms of exposition and especially literary, scientific, and philosophical exposition. Ayn Rand's journals were none of these, simply personal notes and notations meant to guide her own thought process.
If a man were to find admirable qualities in Obama, it would not make him instantly an Obama acolyte. If a man were to find admirable qualities in Reagan, it would not make him instantly a Reaganite. One can admire certain qualities of a person without admiring their motivations or actions, hence the restriction to certain qualities. Some people admire Rommel, despite the fact that he was a Nazi. They can admire his intelligence and skill without admiring his political ideology. Some people admire Clinton despite his philandering. It doesn't mean they admire the whole person, just some things that he did or said. The only way to be certain of why, in what way, and under what conditions that admiration existed, is to have a properly contextualized account of that admiration. The reasons, the exceptions, the moderations...these elements are essential to understanding the meaning of any given utterance in the English language. Without this account, irresponsible accusations slapped onto decontextualized cherry-picked quotes say no more about the character of a person than graffiti on the wall of a bathroom stall--the very place where such "journalism" belongs...in the toilet.
Translator
Showing posts with label evil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evil. Show all posts
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Atlas Shrugged Essay Contest 2009
Just got the word that I didn't place in this year's Atlas Shrugged essay contest. I look forward to reading the winning essays when they're posted on ARI's website. Anyways, here's my entry from this year. Hope you enjoy reading it. -- American Anti-theist
BUSINESS & PLEASURE: Vice and virtue in the life of Hank Rearden
Hank Rearden runs his business with ruthless efficiency. The standard of value by which every aspect of his foundry is decided is one simple principle: What’s best for making metal? The wage of every worker he employs is balanced against the cost that wage adds to the production process and the necessity of that worker’s labor to the creation of product. The prices of materials are balanced against the market price of steel. The market price of steel is driven up by customer demand for his steel and down by the prices offered by his competitors. The only way to survive, the only way to prosper, is to minimize costs, to increase quality, to honor contracts, to expand his production so that he can further minimize costs, increase quality, and so on. In order to accomplish this he must pay his employees wages commensurate with their value. He needs quality workers to create quality product. He must buy quality materials. He cannot satisfy his customers with defective product. He must constantly refine his production process. He must condemn waste. He must reward efficiency. The highest value, the benchmark of all these other contributing elements, is simply the extent to which it enables him to produce better, faster, cheaper steel in greater quantities and make the greatest profit while doing so. This profit is his reward for organizing the resources of his business in such a way as to generate surplus. It is his reward for creating that which would not exist were he not to have created it. In business, this reward takes the form of money, a measure of the value he has added to the lives of all those with whom he does business.
If Rearden were to live as he ran his business, he would deal with all the people around him privately the same as he would deal with them professionally. Every emotional investment would be balanced by an emotional gain. If every process and function of his professional life is to render him a greater producer of steel, then every process and function of his personal life would be geared to render him a greater producer of his life’s highest values. The virtues of business are to minimize costs, to increase quality, to honor contracts, and to expand production. The virtues of his life would thus be frugality, integrity, honesty, and ambition. Just as he cannot settle for hiring just any worker for any job at any wage, so too he cannot afford to accept just any stranger into any given role in his life as only justified by their just having shown up. Friends, lovers, wives, and even family relationships cannot be based solely on chance, on the arbitrary advent of circumstantial proximity. They must be evaluated in terms of the value they offer and the price they demand. If they demand too high a cost for the value they offer, then they are not worthy of the role. On the contrary, the significance of the meaning of the words ‘friend’, ‘lover’, ‘wife’, and ‘family’ rests on the value that the people who fill those roles contribute to one’s life. A businessman cannot afford to promote an employee to a position of importance in his organization which outweighs that employee’s worth to the company. So, too, no man can afford to promote a chance acquaintance to a disproportionate position of importance within his own life. The objective measure of the success of his business is monetary profit, the value created by the practical implementation of his business philosophy. The objective measure of the success of his personal life is happiness, the value created by the practical implementation of his personal philosophy.
Rearden does not, however, initially adhere to parallel philosophies in his business and private life. Instead, Rearden follows a diametrically opposed moral code in his private affairs. His brother Philip, his wife Lillian, his mother, his “friend” Paul Larkin…these characters all represent the philosophical opposites of who should fill those roles were Rearden’s values applied consistently in both modes of his life.
Philip is devoid of ambition and produces nothing. He lives only to beg resources off others for the sake of others. He is an empty vessel, a conduit to be used by other men. He takes no pleasure in his existence nor deserves it. He has so little integrity that he has the audacity to undermine the brother who has supported him without complaint, to accept his money but condemn his character. Rearden would not even consider him for the job of a cinder sweeper, yet he considers him worthy of the title “brother”. Rearden would not even let him inside his mills, yet he allows him into his home and supports his every endeavor.
Lillian taunts Rearden with her sex. She uses it as a weapon to disarm him and to break him with guilt. Rearden is tortured by his own sense of guilt and hypocrisy every time he succumbs to her wiles. Yet he does not recognize that the source of the guilt is not the act of sex itself, but the act of sex with someone so completely devoid of any of the values he holds dear. His relationship with Dagny is the one truly worthy of the title “wife” but he does not recognize this inversion for what it is—that he has made the whore his “wife” and the woman who should be his wife into a whore.
His mother, completely dependent on her son for subsistence can do nothing but condemn him for the virtues which enable him to support her. His childhood “friend”, Paul, is simply someone he happened to know as a child and now is still somehow a friend despite the fact that there is nothing Rearden can conceivably respect him for and that he actively works against Rearden’s interests. Among these characters who hold the highest titles of honor in his life—friend, wife, mother, brother—not a single one is deserving of any respect. If his highest ideals are indeed frugality, integrity, honesty, and ambition, then Dagny should be his wife and Francisco D’Anconia should be his best friend. Yet those who scorn everything he believes in are his most valued relationships and he must view with contempt those who most closely reflect his own values.
Rearden is guilty of a terrible sin, a gross error of judgment. As Francisco tried to warn, "You're guilty of a great sin, Mr. Rearden, much guiltier than they tell you, but not in the way they preach. The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt—and that is what you have been doing all your life. You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. You have been willing to carry the load of an unearned punishment—and to let it grow the heavier the greater the virtues you practiced” (421). Rearden’s willing acceptance of blame for pursuing his highest values has chained him to a philosophical system which will mean his destruction. He has accepted that the values that make him an excellent businessman, an inventor, and an entrepreneur are values which also make him a vile and loathsome human being. He has accepted a false dichotomy which states that productive activity which supports and enriches your existence is evil and that the only good is to support the lives of others. He has accepted the rule which condemns the fulfillment of one’s own desires but praises the fulfillment of the desires held by others. To the exact proportion that Rearden excels in his work, he is evil in his life. This is Rearden’s central error, the one that turns his life upside-down, that tortures him throughout his marriage, that tortures him throughout his affair with the only woman he has ever truly loved, and that eventually forces him to turn over his life’s work and greatest achievement, Rearden Metal, to a thankless mob of thugs as impudent as they are undeserving.
Then, Rearden realizes the weakness of his enemies. That weakness is that they have no power over him except what he has conceded. His sanction is necessary for them to continue their deception. His validation of their moral code is essential to enable them to brand him immoral. Once Rearden withdraws his sanction and aligns his personal moral code with his professional one, he removes the only device by which he could be chained, his own sense of guilt. Guilt is only possible to someone who has virtues, who feels that they have betrayed those virtues and sacrificed a greater value to a lesser one. By removing his acceptance of the slanders against him, he removed the ability of his enemies to pressure him with the guilt he had willingly accepted. By refusing to allow his virtues to be branded as vice, he was at last set free to feel his full worth, to embrace the self-esteem which had been rightfully his to claim from the very first. He was free to embrace his ethical peers as friends and to truly love them selfishly. With that simple realization, he was also set free of the world of decay. For him, the doors of Atlantis were at last opened and his place in the world of the future secured. That simple realization was that one’s virtues really are virtues and that it doesn’t matter who says differently. The only true measure is in one’s own happiness, the profit of a virtuous life.
BUSINESS & PLEASURE: Vice and virtue in the life of Hank Rearden
Hank Rearden runs his business with ruthless efficiency. The standard of value by which every aspect of his foundry is decided is one simple principle: What’s best for making metal? The wage of every worker he employs is balanced against the cost that wage adds to the production process and the necessity of that worker’s labor to the creation of product. The prices of materials are balanced against the market price of steel. The market price of steel is driven up by customer demand for his steel and down by the prices offered by his competitors. The only way to survive, the only way to prosper, is to minimize costs, to increase quality, to honor contracts, to expand his production so that he can further minimize costs, increase quality, and so on. In order to accomplish this he must pay his employees wages commensurate with their value. He needs quality workers to create quality product. He must buy quality materials. He cannot satisfy his customers with defective product. He must constantly refine his production process. He must condemn waste. He must reward efficiency. The highest value, the benchmark of all these other contributing elements, is simply the extent to which it enables him to produce better, faster, cheaper steel in greater quantities and make the greatest profit while doing so. This profit is his reward for organizing the resources of his business in such a way as to generate surplus. It is his reward for creating that which would not exist were he not to have created it. In business, this reward takes the form of money, a measure of the value he has added to the lives of all those with whom he does business.
If Rearden were to live as he ran his business, he would deal with all the people around him privately the same as he would deal with them professionally. Every emotional investment would be balanced by an emotional gain. If every process and function of his professional life is to render him a greater producer of steel, then every process and function of his personal life would be geared to render him a greater producer of his life’s highest values. The virtues of business are to minimize costs, to increase quality, to honor contracts, and to expand production. The virtues of his life would thus be frugality, integrity, honesty, and ambition. Just as he cannot settle for hiring just any worker for any job at any wage, so too he cannot afford to accept just any stranger into any given role in his life as only justified by their just having shown up. Friends, lovers, wives, and even family relationships cannot be based solely on chance, on the arbitrary advent of circumstantial proximity. They must be evaluated in terms of the value they offer and the price they demand. If they demand too high a cost for the value they offer, then they are not worthy of the role. On the contrary, the significance of the meaning of the words ‘friend’, ‘lover’, ‘wife’, and ‘family’ rests on the value that the people who fill those roles contribute to one’s life. A businessman cannot afford to promote an employee to a position of importance in his organization which outweighs that employee’s worth to the company. So, too, no man can afford to promote a chance acquaintance to a disproportionate position of importance within his own life. The objective measure of the success of his business is monetary profit, the value created by the practical implementation of his business philosophy. The objective measure of the success of his personal life is happiness, the value created by the practical implementation of his personal philosophy.
Rearden does not, however, initially adhere to parallel philosophies in his business and private life. Instead, Rearden follows a diametrically opposed moral code in his private affairs. His brother Philip, his wife Lillian, his mother, his “friend” Paul Larkin…these characters all represent the philosophical opposites of who should fill those roles were Rearden’s values applied consistently in both modes of his life.
Philip is devoid of ambition and produces nothing. He lives only to beg resources off others for the sake of others. He is an empty vessel, a conduit to be used by other men. He takes no pleasure in his existence nor deserves it. He has so little integrity that he has the audacity to undermine the brother who has supported him without complaint, to accept his money but condemn his character. Rearden would not even consider him for the job of a cinder sweeper, yet he considers him worthy of the title “brother”. Rearden would not even let him inside his mills, yet he allows him into his home and supports his every endeavor.
Lillian taunts Rearden with her sex. She uses it as a weapon to disarm him and to break him with guilt. Rearden is tortured by his own sense of guilt and hypocrisy every time he succumbs to her wiles. Yet he does not recognize that the source of the guilt is not the act of sex itself, but the act of sex with someone so completely devoid of any of the values he holds dear. His relationship with Dagny is the one truly worthy of the title “wife” but he does not recognize this inversion for what it is—that he has made the whore his “wife” and the woman who should be his wife into a whore.
His mother, completely dependent on her son for subsistence can do nothing but condemn him for the virtues which enable him to support her. His childhood “friend”, Paul, is simply someone he happened to know as a child and now is still somehow a friend despite the fact that there is nothing Rearden can conceivably respect him for and that he actively works against Rearden’s interests. Among these characters who hold the highest titles of honor in his life—friend, wife, mother, brother—not a single one is deserving of any respect. If his highest ideals are indeed frugality, integrity, honesty, and ambition, then Dagny should be his wife and Francisco D’Anconia should be his best friend. Yet those who scorn everything he believes in are his most valued relationships and he must view with contempt those who most closely reflect his own values.
Rearden is guilty of a terrible sin, a gross error of judgment. As Francisco tried to warn, "You're guilty of a great sin, Mr. Rearden, much guiltier than they tell you, but not in the way they preach. The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt—and that is what you have been doing all your life. You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. You have been willing to carry the load of an unearned punishment—and to let it grow the heavier the greater the virtues you practiced” (421). Rearden’s willing acceptance of blame for pursuing his highest values has chained him to a philosophical system which will mean his destruction. He has accepted that the values that make him an excellent businessman, an inventor, and an entrepreneur are values which also make him a vile and loathsome human being. He has accepted a false dichotomy which states that productive activity which supports and enriches your existence is evil and that the only good is to support the lives of others. He has accepted the rule which condemns the fulfillment of one’s own desires but praises the fulfillment of the desires held by others. To the exact proportion that Rearden excels in his work, he is evil in his life. This is Rearden’s central error, the one that turns his life upside-down, that tortures him throughout his marriage, that tortures him throughout his affair with the only woman he has ever truly loved, and that eventually forces him to turn over his life’s work and greatest achievement, Rearden Metal, to a thankless mob of thugs as impudent as they are undeserving.
Then, Rearden realizes the weakness of his enemies. That weakness is that they have no power over him except what he has conceded. His sanction is necessary for them to continue their deception. His validation of their moral code is essential to enable them to brand him immoral. Once Rearden withdraws his sanction and aligns his personal moral code with his professional one, he removes the only device by which he could be chained, his own sense of guilt. Guilt is only possible to someone who has virtues, who feels that they have betrayed those virtues and sacrificed a greater value to a lesser one. By removing his acceptance of the slanders against him, he removed the ability of his enemies to pressure him with the guilt he had willingly accepted. By refusing to allow his virtues to be branded as vice, he was at last set free to feel his full worth, to embrace the self-esteem which had been rightfully his to claim from the very first. He was free to embrace his ethical peers as friends and to truly love them selfishly. With that simple realization, he was also set free of the world of decay. For him, the doors of Atlantis were at last opened and his place in the world of the future secured. That simple realization was that one’s virtues really are virtues and that it doesn’t matter who says differently. The only true measure is in one’s own happiness, the profit of a virtuous life.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Why Do People Still Not Get It?
I received the following question that someone sent to my YouTube channel: bakukenshin, and I thought it fit in nicely with the topics on this blog.
"What do you think of people who have read Ayn Rands books but refuse to believe in or accept the philosophy of Objectivism? Are they simply refusing the ability of the mind or are they afraid of the idea of being responsible for their own decisions? Or does it just go against too much of what they have been "taught"?"
My response was as follows:
I think there are several reasons why people could read her books and not accept the entire philosophy of Objectivism.
1. Most people read a book and they pick and choose what they like about it and what they don't like. Most of the time this coincides with values that they have already decided upon. So a lot of people take Objectivism piecemeal, which results in a lot of what you can see in the Republican party. That is a lot of people who try to push for capitalism and free markets (at least when they're campaigning) but at the same time pushing to restrict civil liberties (such as with the anti-abortion movement, domestic surveillance, etc.).
2. To accept Objectivism, people need to accept three basic premises. Reality is. Existence exists. Consciousness is conscious. Unfortunately most of the gatekeepers to modern philosophy (professors, novelists, poets, scientists, etc.) have been indoctrinated in and come to believe the opposite of at least one of these. Since these are axioms, unless they realize that there is no way to disprove these premises without using them, then they cannot be expected to accept them. In order for someone to change their mind on axiomatic propositions they need to start from the standpoint that reason is the final arbiter of their viewpoints, that they cannot resist what their senses and the rules of logic tell them simply based on their feelings or a priori assertions. But, if they accept that already, then they are already half way to Objectivism anyway.
3. The philosophy of Objectivism isn't self-evident. The reaction of many new objectivists when they've decided to accept it, is to assume that because they read Ayn Rand's works and it makes sense to them, that it must therefore automatically make sense to everybody. Unfortunately, this would be a mistaken assumption. Everybody starts from a different starting point. Some people have devoted a lot of time thinking seriously about fundamental philosophical questions. Some people have not. Even among seriously committed thinkers, it took a long historical tradition starting with Aristotle leading up through the founding of America and it took Ayn Rand's genius building on all that to bring the various threads of history into sharp enough focus to formulate Objectivism. Some people just make some honest mistakes along the chain of abstraction.
4. Some people know better and are consciously malevolent enough to deny it anyway. But be very careful before jumping to conclusions about who you place in this category. Sometimes I think Objectivists need to understand their own philosophy better before they start leaping to judgments about others.
I think it's a little like teaching someone a skill at which you are highly proficient, but the person you're teaching isn't. Like your native language for instance. You don't even think about it. But try teaching it to someone who only knows Chinese. You quickly find out that you have to know things about the structure of your language at a much more detailed level than you'd ever have dreamed of having to worry about before. More importantly, the process of clarifying your thoughts, so as to better present them to others, teaches you things about your own mode of thought and helps you understand your beliefs better than before.
If you seriously teach any subject for a significant period of time, you will understand that subject in a fundamentally different way than if you had just accepted that you knew it and left it at that. I think this is true of math, English, art, and especially philosophy. If you want to truly understand why people don't get it, and understand better just what it is that makes sense to you, then try to think about how you would explain it to someone, calmly and clearly. Try to talk to people about it. Try to teach it. Through this process of discussion, through refining your arguments, through thinking about the points people raise in opposition, you will come to understand the philosophy that much better. And you will have a much clearer image of what it represents, and which people are the ones who should truly be morally condemned. But remember, in these discussions, if you find yourself losing your temper, resorting to insults or irrational tactics or agencies, then you've already lost. You need to accept that when it happens (as it inevitably will), go back and rethink it through.
Objectivism is ultimately understanding yourself. You have to start there. And it can be the hardest place to start. Especially when you're wanting to rush out and change the world. But it is central. After all, that's where everything in Ayn Rand's philosophy begins.
I hope this helps somewhat. I know it didn't exactly address the question as you stated it, but I, too, am struggling with the line between people who are mistaken and people who are consciously evading truth. So, until I reach a conclusion on that, I like to recommend caution before leaping into judgments on people. It can be tempting, and it can be difficult to see the distinction. (This by the way is the very issue that led to the split between Kelley and Peikoff and why the "The Atlas Society" and "The Ayn Rand Institute" aren't on speaking terms.) The above is my best attempt to deal with it myself. Read as much as you can on the philosophy, both the good and the bad. Don't get sidetracked on following any one person's interpretation. Remember the most important perspective is your own. Try to form it in as balanced and rational a way as possible.
--I think the only thing I can add to this right now is in this prior blog post here. I am still very interested in the opinions of other practicing objectivists. If anybody has an opinion on this matter please feel free to post your comments.
Best premises,
American Anti-theist
"What do you think of people who have read Ayn Rands books but refuse to believe in or accept the philosophy of Objectivism? Are they simply refusing the ability of the mind or are they afraid of the idea of being responsible for their own decisions? Or does it just go against too much of what they have been "taught"?"
My response was as follows:
I think there are several reasons why people could read her books and not accept the entire philosophy of Objectivism.
1. Most people read a book and they pick and choose what they like about it and what they don't like. Most of the time this coincides with values that they have already decided upon. So a lot of people take Objectivism piecemeal, which results in a lot of what you can see in the Republican party. That is a lot of people who try to push for capitalism and free markets (at least when they're campaigning) but at the same time pushing to restrict civil liberties (such as with the anti-abortion movement, domestic surveillance, etc.).
2. To accept Objectivism, people need to accept three basic premises. Reality is. Existence exists. Consciousness is conscious. Unfortunately most of the gatekeepers to modern philosophy (professors, novelists, poets, scientists, etc.) have been indoctrinated in and come to believe the opposite of at least one of these. Since these are axioms, unless they realize that there is no way to disprove these premises without using them, then they cannot be expected to accept them. In order for someone to change their mind on axiomatic propositions they need to start from the standpoint that reason is the final arbiter of their viewpoints, that they cannot resist what their senses and the rules of logic tell them simply based on their feelings or a priori assertions. But, if they accept that already, then they are already half way to Objectivism anyway.
3. The philosophy of Objectivism isn't self-evident. The reaction of many new objectivists when they've decided to accept it, is to assume that because they read Ayn Rand's works and it makes sense to them, that it must therefore automatically make sense to everybody. Unfortunately, this would be a mistaken assumption. Everybody starts from a different starting point. Some people have devoted a lot of time thinking seriously about fundamental philosophical questions. Some people have not. Even among seriously committed thinkers, it took a long historical tradition starting with Aristotle leading up through the founding of America and it took Ayn Rand's genius building on all that to bring the various threads of history into sharp enough focus to formulate Objectivism. Some people just make some honest mistakes along the chain of abstraction.
4. Some people know better and are consciously malevolent enough to deny it anyway. But be very careful before jumping to conclusions about who you place in this category. Sometimes I think Objectivists need to understand their own philosophy better before they start leaping to judgments about others.
I think it's a little like teaching someone a skill at which you are highly proficient, but the person you're teaching isn't. Like your native language for instance. You don't even think about it. But try teaching it to someone who only knows Chinese. You quickly find out that you have to know things about the structure of your language at a much more detailed level than you'd ever have dreamed of having to worry about before. More importantly, the process of clarifying your thoughts, so as to better present them to others, teaches you things about your own mode of thought and helps you understand your beliefs better than before.
If you seriously teach any subject for a significant period of time, you will understand that subject in a fundamentally different way than if you had just accepted that you knew it and left it at that. I think this is true of math, English, art, and especially philosophy. If you want to truly understand why people don't get it, and understand better just what it is that makes sense to you, then try to think about how you would explain it to someone, calmly and clearly. Try to talk to people about it. Try to teach it. Through this process of discussion, through refining your arguments, through thinking about the points people raise in opposition, you will come to understand the philosophy that much better. And you will have a much clearer image of what it represents, and which people are the ones who should truly be morally condemned. But remember, in these discussions, if you find yourself losing your temper, resorting to insults or irrational tactics or agencies, then you've already lost. You need to accept that when it happens (as it inevitably will), go back and rethink it through.
Objectivism is ultimately understanding yourself. You have to start there. And it can be the hardest place to start. Especially when you're wanting to rush out and change the world. But it is central. After all, that's where everything in Ayn Rand's philosophy begins.
I hope this helps somewhat. I know it didn't exactly address the question as you stated it, but I, too, am struggling with the line between people who are mistaken and people who are consciously evading truth. So, until I reach a conclusion on that, I like to recommend caution before leaping into judgments on people. It can be tempting, and it can be difficult to see the distinction. (This by the way is the very issue that led to the split between Kelley and Peikoff and why the "The Atlas Society" and "The Ayn Rand Institute" aren't on speaking terms.) The above is my best attempt to deal with it myself. Read as much as you can on the philosophy, both the good and the bad. Don't get sidetracked on following any one person's interpretation. Remember the most important perspective is your own. Try to form it in as balanced and rational a way as possible.
--I think the only thing I can add to this right now is in this prior blog post here. I am still very interested in the opinions of other practicing objectivists. If anybody has an opinion on this matter please feel free to post your comments.
Best premises,
American Anti-theist
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
In Mourning for America
Do the math:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-budget7-2009may07,0,4310621.story
A 3.55 trillion dollar budget....17 billion dollars in budget cuts...a deficit of 1.2 trillion dollars...
Now, seriously....any investor....any one sitting at home doing their finances, would they seriously think that these numbers are acceptable? When you're in debt, do you spend more hoping that you'll magically bring in increased revenues somewhere down the line? Do you buy 2 new cars, a GM and a Chrysler with the hope that if you give them some money, they may give you a job, or a raise? Does it make any sense to increase debt beyond our ability to pay it back? If you're in business, do you expand your company's operations when sales are down? If you're managing a household, do you go on a luxurious vacation, when the creditors are knocking at the door?
No, of course not. Anyone who did that would be at least grossly irresponsible, and possibly insane. Does it justify it any more to demand that our children and our children's children, that generations, yes, generations of our descendants will have to pay for these excesses? Doesn't that make it all the more evil, to assign debt to those who have no say in the matter, to burden them with an obligation to feed our folly? Is it satisfying to mark our children with the mark of Obama's breed of original sin?
This madness seems to know no bounds. I do not see a bright future for America until a significant libertarian presence is felt in Congress and the White House. As such, I've darkened the background of my page to reflect the feeling that America has entered a dark age of decline. Hopefully the grassroots efforts of advocates of liberty across the nation will one-day be enough to lift this blinding curtain of self-righteousness and end the orgy of self-immolation which is the American politic.
Just think of it, and does it make any sense:
$1,200,000,000,000 deficit
- $17,000,000,000 budget cuts
=$1,183,000,000,000 remaining deficit
....Just what kind of difference is Obama making?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-budget7-2009may07,0,4310621.story
A 3.55 trillion dollar budget....17 billion dollars in budget cuts...a deficit of 1.2 trillion dollars...
Now, seriously....any investor....any one sitting at home doing their finances, would they seriously think that these numbers are acceptable? When you're in debt, do you spend more hoping that you'll magically bring in increased revenues somewhere down the line? Do you buy 2 new cars, a GM and a Chrysler with the hope that if you give them some money, they may give you a job, or a raise? Does it make any sense to increase debt beyond our ability to pay it back? If you're in business, do you expand your company's operations when sales are down? If you're managing a household, do you go on a luxurious vacation, when the creditors are knocking at the door?
No, of course not. Anyone who did that would be at least grossly irresponsible, and possibly insane. Does it justify it any more to demand that our children and our children's children, that generations, yes, generations of our descendants will have to pay for these excesses? Doesn't that make it all the more evil, to assign debt to those who have no say in the matter, to burden them with an obligation to feed our folly? Is it satisfying to mark our children with the mark of Obama's breed of original sin?
This madness seems to know no bounds. I do not see a bright future for America until a significant libertarian presence is felt in Congress and the White House. As such, I've darkened the background of my page to reflect the feeling that America has entered a dark age of decline. Hopefully the grassroots efforts of advocates of liberty across the nation will one-day be enough to lift this blinding curtain of self-righteousness and end the orgy of self-immolation which is the American politic.
Just think of it, and does it make any sense:
$1,200,000,000,000 deficit
- $17,000,000,000 budget cuts
=$1,183,000,000,000 remaining deficit
....Just what kind of difference is Obama making?
Monday, May 4, 2009
A Proposal for a Rational Code of Morality
I was just sorting through some old papers and ran across this thought experiment I wrote up almost 10 years ago. At the time I didn't understand objectivism anywhere near as I do now and was still rather tolerant of religious beliefs. At the same time, I was already very libertarian in my political beliefs. I'm posting this, not because I see it as the final word on morality or anything. On the contrary, I'm sure there are more than enough flaws...especially in my all too brief assessment of epistemology. However, I think it still raises some interesting points, and a novel way of thinking about moral decisions. Anyways, if you're interested, you can check it out here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddt4f3w9_4hmscz7hk
As always, please let me know what you think of it. Good or bad. And then we can discuss it.
Best premises,
American Anti-theist
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddt4f3w9_4hmscz7hk
As always, please let me know what you think of it. Good or bad. And then we can discuss it.
Best premises,
American Anti-theist
Saturday, April 11, 2009
It's Your Life
Your life is your property. It's not mine. It's not your neighbor's or your spouse's. It's not your God's, your preacher's or your governor's. It does not belong to Barack Obama any more than it belongs to Kim Jong Il. And if it doesn't belong to Obama, it surely doesn't belong to Sarkozy or Brown or Medvedev or any of the other supposed leaders of this world who keep yapping at our heels to give more and more, to sacrifice ourselves to the lowest common denominator, to abandon our independence and enslave ourselves to a self-proclaimed new world order which seeks only to compound the problems of today by magnifying them tomorrow.
The argument has always gone that we haven't done enough. What if we've already been doing too much? What if the smug certainty of our politicians is actually misplaced? After all, are they economists? Are they historians? Are they philosophers? How deeply have they thought about the current crisis? Or are they simply parroting what their economics advisors, steeped in Keynesnianism have told them? Are they simply parroting what their philosophy teachers steeped in Kant have told them? Are they simply parroting what their law professors steeped in moral relativism have told them?
The root issue, the key, the crux upon which the entire scope of the major problems in the world today hinge is one pivotal issue: Do you have the right to your own life? Ask any proponent of central banking. Ask any advocate of public education. Ask any idealogue who advocates any social program where the fundamental and underlying premise is that your life belongs not to you, but to the state and that the state has the right to your life, that they have the right to do anything they want to you as long as they have the blessed "mandate of governance". Ask these people, "Do you have the right to your own life?" Ask them. And they will evade and dodge, and badger, and become indignant. But if you can actually get them to answer that question straight out, the answer will be "No". I've seen this many times, the desperate scramble to evade answering a simple yes or no question. Also, the horror of that single-syllable answer.
Because what does it mean if you do not have the right to your own life? It means that noone does. It means that anyone can be dealt with by others in any way. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of justice. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of morality.
But there is an objective standard of morality: your own life. What makes it harder to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the evil. What makes it easier to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the good. Life and Death are the simplest moral choices at the base of one's morality. Do you want to live? Or, do you want to die? If you decided to live, then all the things which make that life worth living become values to you. Your children, your family, clean air, and water, working hard to reap the products of that work to gain food and clothes for your family, so that they can live and generate life and so on. Life is an end in itself. Happiness is the consequence of a moral life in that the moral life optimizes one's realization of life. As one philosopher put it, "Happiness is enough to make life desirable and lacking in nothing." But the same philosopher also said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
Happiness is not achieved by range of the moment actions, based simply on the arbitrary desires of the moment. Happiness is only attainable by examining the consequences of a plan of action over the span of one's entire life. It does not mean a state of prolonged and constant euphoria. It means self-esteem, self-respect, and the contentment that comes from honest living.
But implicit in the realization of happiness is that you are free to decide how your life shall be lived. Implicit in the realization of morality is that you be free to be moral. If you are not free to decide what ideas to support, to dispose of the fruits of your labor as would best suit your personal self-interests, if, in short, you are not free to work for your own good, then you are not free. If you are not free, you cannot be happy. If you are not free, you cannot be moral or immoral. If you are not free, then you are only a slave. If you do not have a right to your own life, then you are only a slave. If nobody has a right to their own lives, then everybody is a slave to the majority opinion holder of the moment and everyone must live in fear that the next majority wave of opinion will target them as the scapegoat to be sacrificed to the mob.
The founders of the United States of America understood this interconnectedness of happiness, freedom, morality, economy, and politics. The one failing was that they compromised on the moral principles and sought to justify the American system on altruistic grounds, on the principle that the justification for such a system is the good of the many. The true justification of the American system is that it rests not on the good of the many, but on the good of the one--you and what is good for you, yourself. Human rights cannot be held by any collective, because any collective is simply a group of individual human beings. If individual human beings do not have rights, then the group also has no rights. Human rights are inalienable, they are independent of the will of the mob, or of individual power holders. Thus, in the American system, political power holders must subordinate their actions within the limits proscribed by the doctrine of human rights. Conversely, American citizens should be free to do whatever they like unless it is expressly prohibited by a doctrine of human rights.
To adhere to a doctrine of human rights is to constrain the politicians and to liberate mankind. To reverse this is to turn politicians into Gods and humanity into slaves.
Your life is your property. If there are no property rights, there is no right to life. If you surrender your right to life, it is the same as committing suicide, a long slow suicide where the killing stroke will come at an arbitrary time and an arbitrary place. If you surrender your right to life, you surrender all the values that come with it. Justice, Freedom, Security....you cannot have one without the others.
Don't surrender your right to life any longer. Demand that the government commit to a doctrine based on the rights of the individual as opposed to the right of mob rule. Instead of forming increasingly expansive world governmental organizations, demand that the governments at home recognize individual rights and act to preserve them. There is too much lip service to rights, and too much sacrifice of them on the altar of a vague and unspecified "good" which we will never see, and our children are expected to slave to pay for. Enough of the political expediency of cake today, and poverty tomorrow. Enough of the sacrifice of the generations to come for some unseen benefit today. Demand your freedom and your rights. Demand the right to hold property, to dispose of it as you will. Demand the right for you to run your own life. Demand that your life is your own and noone else's to arbitrarily dictate to. Demand your right to yourself.
And if you hold that you do not have the right to your own life....kill yourself, and get out of the way of those who want to live.
The argument has always gone that we haven't done enough. What if we've already been doing too much? What if the smug certainty of our politicians is actually misplaced? After all, are they economists? Are they historians? Are they philosophers? How deeply have they thought about the current crisis? Or are they simply parroting what their economics advisors, steeped in Keynesnianism have told them? Are they simply parroting what their philosophy teachers steeped in Kant have told them? Are they simply parroting what their law professors steeped in moral relativism have told them?
The root issue, the key, the crux upon which the entire scope of the major problems in the world today hinge is one pivotal issue: Do you have the right to your own life? Ask any proponent of central banking. Ask any advocate of public education. Ask any idealogue who advocates any social program where the fundamental and underlying premise is that your life belongs not to you, but to the state and that the state has the right to your life, that they have the right to do anything they want to you as long as they have the blessed "mandate of governance". Ask these people, "Do you have the right to your own life?" Ask them. And they will evade and dodge, and badger, and become indignant. But if you can actually get them to answer that question straight out, the answer will be "No". I've seen this many times, the desperate scramble to evade answering a simple yes or no question. Also, the horror of that single-syllable answer.
Because what does it mean if you do not have the right to your own life? It means that noone does. It means that anyone can be dealt with by others in any way. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of justice. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of morality.
But there is an objective standard of morality: your own life. What makes it harder to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the evil. What makes it easier to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the good. Life and Death are the simplest moral choices at the base of one's morality. Do you want to live? Or, do you want to die? If you decided to live, then all the things which make that life worth living become values to you. Your children, your family, clean air, and water, working hard to reap the products of that work to gain food and clothes for your family, so that they can live and generate life and so on. Life is an end in itself. Happiness is the consequence of a moral life in that the moral life optimizes one's realization of life. As one philosopher put it, "Happiness is enough to make life desirable and lacking in nothing." But the same philosopher also said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
Happiness is not achieved by range of the moment actions, based simply on the arbitrary desires of the moment. Happiness is only attainable by examining the consequences of a plan of action over the span of one's entire life. It does not mean a state of prolonged and constant euphoria. It means self-esteem, self-respect, and the contentment that comes from honest living.
But implicit in the realization of happiness is that you are free to decide how your life shall be lived. Implicit in the realization of morality is that you be free to be moral. If you are not free to decide what ideas to support, to dispose of the fruits of your labor as would best suit your personal self-interests, if, in short, you are not free to work for your own good, then you are not free. If you are not free, you cannot be happy. If you are not free, you cannot be moral or immoral. If you are not free, then you are only a slave. If you do not have a right to your own life, then you are only a slave. If nobody has a right to their own lives, then everybody is a slave to the majority opinion holder of the moment and everyone must live in fear that the next majority wave of opinion will target them as the scapegoat to be sacrificed to the mob.
The founders of the United States of America understood this interconnectedness of happiness, freedom, morality, economy, and politics. The one failing was that they compromised on the moral principles and sought to justify the American system on altruistic grounds, on the principle that the justification for such a system is the good of the many. The true justification of the American system is that it rests not on the good of the many, but on the good of the one--you and what is good for you, yourself. Human rights cannot be held by any collective, because any collective is simply a group of individual human beings. If individual human beings do not have rights, then the group also has no rights. Human rights are inalienable, they are independent of the will of the mob, or of individual power holders. Thus, in the American system, political power holders must subordinate their actions within the limits proscribed by the doctrine of human rights. Conversely, American citizens should be free to do whatever they like unless it is expressly prohibited by a doctrine of human rights.
To adhere to a doctrine of human rights is to constrain the politicians and to liberate mankind. To reverse this is to turn politicians into Gods and humanity into slaves.
Your life is your property. If there are no property rights, there is no right to life. If you surrender your right to life, it is the same as committing suicide, a long slow suicide where the killing stroke will come at an arbitrary time and an arbitrary place. If you surrender your right to life, you surrender all the values that come with it. Justice, Freedom, Security....you cannot have one without the others.
Don't surrender your right to life any longer. Demand that the government commit to a doctrine based on the rights of the individual as opposed to the right of mob rule. Instead of forming increasingly expansive world governmental organizations, demand that the governments at home recognize individual rights and act to preserve them. There is too much lip service to rights, and too much sacrifice of them on the altar of a vague and unspecified "good" which we will never see, and our children are expected to slave to pay for. Enough of the political expediency of cake today, and poverty tomorrow. Enough of the sacrifice of the generations to come for some unseen benefit today. Demand your freedom and your rights. Demand the right to hold property, to dispose of it as you will. Demand the right for you to run your own life. Demand that your life is your own and noone else's to arbitrarily dictate to. Demand your right to yourself.
And if you hold that you do not have the right to your own life....kill yourself, and get out of the way of those who want to live.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The Communists Have Landed
I have to say that I am weary of looking in the news and seeing socialist / communist rhetoric spewing forth from Lord Obama and his cronies. Not only is the government buying out US companies on the cheap (a de facto nationalization strategy as illustrated by act such as this: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aqOyfIA14XQ8&refer=us ) but the very question of the propriety of nationalization is a total non-issue in the current political discourse. All that the so-called defenders of capitalism can do is equivocate on the practicality of doing so. All they can do is equivocate on the potential harm to the people. Nobody at all seems to be concerned with whether such action is morally right. Nobody at all seems to remember a little thing like human rights, rights which our nation was supposed to believe are INALIENABLE. Admittedly, most of Obama's supporters probably don't even recognize what the word inalienable even means, much less what the concept of human rights entails. No, they equate rights with an open-ended hunger. Their concept of rights is an infinite demand on what they percieve as a mystically infinite supply of naturally growing wealth. Shake the tree all you want, there'll still be more fruit on it tomorrow, right? But they don't seem to realize that if you cut down the tree, haul it over into your yard and prop it up against a shed--it will not yield fruit next year.Now, don't get me wrong, I thing Wagoner was a fruitcake. He went crying to the government for help, and sure enough they gave him the help he so desperately deserved--a solid kick in the ass. But the point is that the free market would've sent Wagoner packing anyways and without sacrificing taxpayer money and without setting a dangerous precedent for the arbitrary government nationalization of American industries. Let the idiot CEOs fail, let the brilliant ones prosper, and let us all work to fill the jobs created by the ingenuity and excellence of the very best productive minds around us. The only jobs a government can provide are those which enable it to file, index, sort, encage, punish, and monitor the rest of us. This is because a government's sole function is to maintain and enforce the rule of law. All it can do is threaten, fine, and imprison people. A government doesn't create wealth. It produces nothing of value. It's function is to maintain an environment where people are free to produce freely. By constraining that environment, by bringing it's legislative violence into the private sector, the government in effect becomes a totalitarian force with it's eyes and hands on everybody's life, and the net result is that people are not allowed to be as efficient as they could be were they simply allowed to pursue their own happiness.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness used to be more than just words, they were a dream and an ideal worth fighting for, worth dying for, and more importantly--worth living for. And yet we find ourselves tied down in an age where the last flailing remnants of American idealism are being skinned alive, where the stillborn dream of an American society was sacrificed on the altar of "God and Society" with the self-defiant neurotic cry "For the good of the many!" What is America with no right to one's own life? What is America without the freedom to know your own mind and to act upon the values you decide for yourself? What is America without the moral conviction that one's happiness is an end in and of itself, that one's values have value, that one's dreams mean something? Those dreams mean something, Damn it! They mean something because they are fragile and isolated and occur only fleetingly in the minds of individual men and women all over the Earth. Those dreams that become generators. Those dreams that become companies. Those dreams that become the lifeblood of those who couldn't dream as well or as hard or as thoroughly. Ideas mean something, and the more fragile and fleeting, the more precious those ideas become.
The laughing dreams of children do not have to become the discarded carcasses of compromising adults. For the sake of us all, for your own sake, and for the sake of decency, don't sell out the American dream for a smile and a handshake and the burning coals of "good intentions". Vote libertarian or Vote for Ron Paul in the next election. Protest, speak out, scream out for Obama to stop his systematic, methodical butchering of the human spirit.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Why I'm an Objectivist
Well, I guess that Ayn Rand's books are experiencing a surge of interest due to the economic crisis. But amidst all the pundits weighing in on one side or the other, I'd simply like to talk about why I'm an Objectivist.
A lot of people point out that Greenspan was an Objectivist (he even wrote several of the essays in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal). But the policies and decisions he pursued in his career make him anything but. How can the chief of the Fed, who sits in unilateral judgment over the arbitrary outlay of interest rates and the monetary supply, possibly be supportive of the government deregulation of the financial system? No, Greenspan isn't an Objectivist.
A lot of people get hung up on that deal with the Brandens, or with the Peikoff-Kelley split. The former is a sideshow bearing no relevance to Ayn Rand's philosophical ideas. It is akin to discrediting the Declaration of Independence because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Somebody can make mistakes in character judgment, or bad choices and still have good ideas. That's why there is a logical fallacy devoted to just such an error, ad hominem (meaning against the man). The latter focuses on a very relevant issue, the proper moral response to dissent. I'm honestly not sure which side is correct in their assessments, as I've recently stated, I'm not sure myself how to properly discern between evasion and deception and whether or not there should morally be a different response for the two, or if they deserve to be lumped together. This jury of one is still out on that subject, and until I reach a verdict, I will be hesitant to condemn either side unilaterally. After all, error is a very real occurrence. To deny the capacity for error is to assert that we are all granted a priori knowledge of the universe, an assertion closer to the philosophy of Plato than that of Rand. And I don't believe in patently accepting orthodoxy from any source if I don't fully understand the principles involved.
Some people assert that Rand has a utilitarian value, that she provides the moral justification for capitalism. Well, she does. But that isn't a reason to believe in Objectivism. The only viable reason to believe in Objectivism is this: is it true?
To ask this question of most philosophies is to encounter a Cartesian loop of circular reasoning. Most philosophies demand that you accept either a God, or social force, or some vague and inexplicable internal sense as the final arbiter of morality. Only Rand came forth to say that what is moral is based solidly in the tangible reality and tangible demands of our physical existence. The reason philosophers scoff at Objectivism is because it is fully comprehensible. The reason why it isn't taken seriously is because it does not rest on a leap of faith, a "feeling" that something is right or wrong. It rests on reason. Philosophers have spent generations arguing about whether they can know that reality exists, how they can know anything if they can't assume anything about existence, endless wormholes of uncertainty and referenceless abstractions based on clouds of air where they simply try to rationalize their own assumptions about morality by any means necessary. There is a very real reason why we tend to think of something as "deep" which is completely incomprehensible or bizarre. It is because what many of our philosophers have presented to us as deep and fundamental truths of existence have in fact been nothing more than incomprehensible or bizarre all along.
Rand was the first one in modern history to come out and say "The Emperor has no clothes...and this is why." She stated that some assumptions are necessary, that they are in fact assumed by anyone who would attempt to disprove them: Existence exists, Consciousness is conscious, A thing is itself (A is A). Her philosophical system anticipated significant developments in cognitive science (such as the embodiment of cognitive experience and the necessity for a hierarchy of concept formation for information processing) and linguistics (such as examining the concealment of agency realized by transitivity and passivization as a technique for encoding hidden ideology). Objectivism has ramifications for economics, political science, morality, law, and education. All of these fields are traditionally presented to us as decontextualized, incomprehensible forces of nature to which we must simply react, but can never hope to comprehend or to influence.
Objectivism makes explicit the underlying mechanisms of all of these processes and shows how we are the center of all of these systems, that we are not just passive receivers of some arbitrary destiny; that we have the power and indeed, the responsibility, to act upon those systems to make them better for our own sakes. And that by working to make these systems more productive objectively, that by striving to attain our own individual rational self-interest, by seeking to attain the best that life has to offer over the entire span of one's life, that the net result is an immeasurable benefit for everyone. But that the justification is not in the benefit to all but in the benefit to one's self. That we are born into this life as ourselves, that we experience only the life that we have as ourselves, and that the pursuit of happiness is not a pragmatic end, but a moral pursuit in and of itself.
Objectivism offers HAPPINESS, whereas the other varied philosophies and ideologies of our age only demand SACRIFICE. Sacrifice to what? For whose benefit? Will my children be the happier for me having sacrificed their economic well-being today? Will I truly have any greater guarantee of security by demanding that they pay for my retirement, when in fact the economic necessities of the system will mean that social security will most likely not even exist by that time? Will they be the better educated by demanding that they be constrained to the lowest common denominator of educational quality made possible by averaging the resources of the community as opposed to what I could provide for them unfettered by the economic burdens imposed by the government? No. No. No.
Opponents of Objectivism need to make an explicit stand, one that they cannot ultimately justify and thus why they always resort to ad hominem attacks or dodge the issue. Objectivism ultimately stands for the rational pursuit of your happiness over the span of your life. It holds that as a moral virtue, the highest moral goal. To say that Objectivism is evil, is to say that the pursuit of happiness is evil. To say that Objectivism is wrong, is to say that it is wrong to be happy, it is wrong to want the best for your children, it is wrong to receive greater pay for greater work, that any attempts to advance your position in life is evil and the most we can hope for in our imperfect lives is to beg for the mercy of those who hold incontrovertible power over us, whether they be thrust into that position by design or the vagaries of the political process.
I refute this view of life. I cannot accept that I was born to be the tool of others, that I was born to be used, manipulated, milked of whatever capacity I have and then to be cast aside with the fruits of my productivity to be dispensed according to the whims of a lunatic mob. I believe in the principles that America was founded upon. I believe in this nation of principles, the only nation ever founded by philosophers. What Ayn Rand represents is not a radical divergence from American values, she represents the soul of American virtue unabashedly claiming its rightful distinction as the only moral system which does not treat humanity as sacrifical animals to be slaughtered for the sake of anyone's whims, whether they be the dreams of one man, or the dreams of us all. This virtue can only be fully realized if we accept the objective basis of morality, the objective determinants of justice and just law.
And the final reason that I am an objectivist is not just because the logical arguments makes sense to me, but that I can see the principles that Objectivism makes clear in operation in every aspect of life around me. When I see the way people react to politics, or economics, or education. When I see the things that are easy to teach or are easy to learn. The more I discover about the processes of the human mind, and society. Everything that I learn from science and my experience with other human beings in society. Everything makes sense when viewed from an Objectivist perspective. Where before, there was only a chaos of competing voices all crying for power, all crying for pity, all teetering on an uncertain foundation rocking on the waves of public opinion, I have now come to see the levers which operate those systems, and to understand the motivations driving the forces in our society. When I see the accuracy with which the themes in Ayn Rand's works play out in the news around me and even in my own personal life, I cannot refute the predictive power of her model. No other philosophy I have studied has come anywhere near as close in terms of precise clarity and comprehensive explanatory power.
And that is why I am an Objectivist. If I were to find a proof, whether it be logical or practical which invalidated the propositions of Objectivism, I would surrender the title of Objectivist and set about constructing a revised philosophy incorporating that proof. But I haven't yet. Despite all the ranting on the internet. Despite all the spite and condemnations of Rand's work. Despite all the insults and some outright lies. Not a single detractor has been able to provide a significant counter-argument. So I ask openly: if you (anybody out there at all) have an objection, bring it forth. Let's talk about this here and now. If you can show me the error of my ways, then do so. But I only ask one thing in return. That if your arguments prove to be the weaker, will you be as willing to change your views? If you are, then you're probably closer to being an Objectivist than you may think.
A lot of people point out that Greenspan was an Objectivist (he even wrote several of the essays in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal). But the policies and decisions he pursued in his career make him anything but. How can the chief of the Fed, who sits in unilateral judgment over the arbitrary outlay of interest rates and the monetary supply, possibly be supportive of the government deregulation of the financial system? No, Greenspan isn't an Objectivist.
A lot of people get hung up on that deal with the Brandens, or with the Peikoff-Kelley split. The former is a sideshow bearing no relevance to Ayn Rand's philosophical ideas. It is akin to discrediting the Declaration of Independence because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Somebody can make mistakes in character judgment, or bad choices and still have good ideas. That's why there is a logical fallacy devoted to just such an error, ad hominem (meaning against the man). The latter focuses on a very relevant issue, the proper moral response to dissent. I'm honestly not sure which side is correct in their assessments, as I've recently stated, I'm not sure myself how to properly discern between evasion and deception and whether or not there should morally be a different response for the two, or if they deserve to be lumped together. This jury of one is still out on that subject, and until I reach a verdict, I will be hesitant to condemn either side unilaterally. After all, error is a very real occurrence. To deny the capacity for error is to assert that we are all granted a priori knowledge of the universe, an assertion closer to the philosophy of Plato than that of Rand. And I don't believe in patently accepting orthodoxy from any source if I don't fully understand the principles involved.
Some people assert that Rand has a utilitarian value, that she provides the moral justification for capitalism. Well, she does. But that isn't a reason to believe in Objectivism. The only viable reason to believe in Objectivism is this: is it true?
To ask this question of most philosophies is to encounter a Cartesian loop of circular reasoning. Most philosophies demand that you accept either a God, or social force, or some vague and inexplicable internal sense as the final arbiter of morality. Only Rand came forth to say that what is moral is based solidly in the tangible reality and tangible demands of our physical existence. The reason philosophers scoff at Objectivism is because it is fully comprehensible. The reason why it isn't taken seriously is because it does not rest on a leap of faith, a "feeling" that something is right or wrong. It rests on reason. Philosophers have spent generations arguing about whether they can know that reality exists, how they can know anything if they can't assume anything about existence, endless wormholes of uncertainty and referenceless abstractions based on clouds of air where they simply try to rationalize their own assumptions about morality by any means necessary. There is a very real reason why we tend to think of something as "deep" which is completely incomprehensible or bizarre. It is because what many of our philosophers have presented to us as deep and fundamental truths of existence have in fact been nothing more than incomprehensible or bizarre all along.
Rand was the first one in modern history to come out and say "The Emperor has no clothes...and this is why." She stated that some assumptions are necessary, that they are in fact assumed by anyone who would attempt to disprove them: Existence exists, Consciousness is conscious, A thing is itself (A is A). Her philosophical system anticipated significant developments in cognitive science (such as the embodiment of cognitive experience and the necessity for a hierarchy of concept formation for information processing) and linguistics (such as examining the concealment of agency realized by transitivity and passivization as a technique for encoding hidden ideology). Objectivism has ramifications for economics, political science, morality, law, and education. All of these fields are traditionally presented to us as decontextualized, incomprehensible forces of nature to which we must simply react, but can never hope to comprehend or to influence.
Objectivism makes explicit the underlying mechanisms of all of these processes and shows how we are the center of all of these systems, that we are not just passive receivers of some arbitrary destiny; that we have the power and indeed, the responsibility, to act upon those systems to make them better for our own sakes. And that by working to make these systems more productive objectively, that by striving to attain our own individual rational self-interest, by seeking to attain the best that life has to offer over the entire span of one's life, that the net result is an immeasurable benefit for everyone. But that the justification is not in the benefit to all but in the benefit to one's self. That we are born into this life as ourselves, that we experience only the life that we have as ourselves, and that the pursuit of happiness is not a pragmatic end, but a moral pursuit in and of itself.
Objectivism offers HAPPINESS, whereas the other varied philosophies and ideologies of our age only demand SACRIFICE. Sacrifice to what? For whose benefit? Will my children be the happier for me having sacrificed their economic well-being today? Will I truly have any greater guarantee of security by demanding that they pay for my retirement, when in fact the economic necessities of the system will mean that social security will most likely not even exist by that time? Will they be the better educated by demanding that they be constrained to the lowest common denominator of educational quality made possible by averaging the resources of the community as opposed to what I could provide for them unfettered by the economic burdens imposed by the government? No. No. No.
Opponents of Objectivism need to make an explicit stand, one that they cannot ultimately justify and thus why they always resort to ad hominem attacks or dodge the issue. Objectivism ultimately stands for the rational pursuit of your happiness over the span of your life. It holds that as a moral virtue, the highest moral goal. To say that Objectivism is evil, is to say that the pursuit of happiness is evil. To say that Objectivism is wrong, is to say that it is wrong to be happy, it is wrong to want the best for your children, it is wrong to receive greater pay for greater work, that any attempts to advance your position in life is evil and the most we can hope for in our imperfect lives is to beg for the mercy of those who hold incontrovertible power over us, whether they be thrust into that position by design or the vagaries of the political process.
I refute this view of life. I cannot accept that I was born to be the tool of others, that I was born to be used, manipulated, milked of whatever capacity I have and then to be cast aside with the fruits of my productivity to be dispensed according to the whims of a lunatic mob. I believe in the principles that America was founded upon. I believe in this nation of principles, the only nation ever founded by philosophers. What Ayn Rand represents is not a radical divergence from American values, she represents the soul of American virtue unabashedly claiming its rightful distinction as the only moral system which does not treat humanity as sacrifical animals to be slaughtered for the sake of anyone's whims, whether they be the dreams of one man, or the dreams of us all. This virtue can only be fully realized if we accept the objective basis of morality, the objective determinants of justice and just law.
And the final reason that I am an objectivist is not just because the logical arguments makes sense to me, but that I can see the principles that Objectivism makes clear in operation in every aspect of life around me. When I see the way people react to politics, or economics, or education. When I see the things that are easy to teach or are easy to learn. The more I discover about the processes of the human mind, and society. Everything that I learn from science and my experience with other human beings in society. Everything makes sense when viewed from an Objectivist perspective. Where before, there was only a chaos of competing voices all crying for power, all crying for pity, all teetering on an uncertain foundation rocking on the waves of public opinion, I have now come to see the levers which operate those systems, and to understand the motivations driving the forces in our society. When I see the accuracy with which the themes in Ayn Rand's works play out in the news around me and even in my own personal life, I cannot refute the predictive power of her model. No other philosophy I have studied has come anywhere near as close in terms of precise clarity and comprehensive explanatory power.
And that is why I am an Objectivist. If I were to find a proof, whether it be logical or practical which invalidated the propositions of Objectivism, I would surrender the title of Objectivist and set about constructing a revised philosophy incorporating that proof. But I haven't yet. Despite all the ranting on the internet. Despite all the spite and condemnations of Rand's work. Despite all the insults and some outright lies. Not a single detractor has been able to provide a significant counter-argument. So I ask openly: if you (anybody out there at all) have an objection, bring it forth. Let's talk about this here and now. If you can show me the error of my ways, then do so. But I only ask one thing in return. That if your arguments prove to be the weaker, will you be as willing to change your views? If you are, then you're probably closer to being an Objectivist than you may think.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
It's been a while... お久しぶり
First off, I'd like to apologize for being away for so long. But real life takes a priority over my internet musings. Anyways, having taken care of business for now, I find myself with some time to comment on the events of the last 4 months. Probably most prominent in everybody's minds is the full-blown financial panic that is sweeping over the world. The dollar is trading for 88 yen, the Dow is down, way down, and the big auto companies are on the verge of collapse. In the midst of this we have Greenspan lamenting the free-market system and Fortune 500 executives running down to Washington to beg for money--your money.
So, it goes without saying that a lot of people are wondering what Obama is going to do with this mess when he gets into office. A lot of people, that is, except for me. That's because I know exactly what he's going to do. He's going to spend a lot of government money. He's going to give a lot of money to big business, of course not the same big business cronies that Bush has, he'll give it to his green frontier democratic buddies. They may very well let the car companies hang (as they really should) but I don't think they'll go through with it. The Democrats are too reliant on unionized labor. Although the only way they're going to be able to pay for all these bailouts and all the social programs they want to cram down our throats is to raise taxes. Or perhaps they'll just raise taxes on businesses and the rich. (As if that won't be even more of a reason for companies and rich people to put their money elsewhere). Or, like Bernanke and the incompetent quacks at the FED have already done, devalue the currency like there's no tomorrow.
0% interest rates are not a good thing. Printing money on 0% interest rates to "increase cash flow" is not a good thing. It has one tangible result. Yes, money increases. But the downside is that money is worth less. Or worthless as the case may be. Japan is still stuck with interest rates next to nothing after 20 years of recession. It took Koizumi and his aggressive stance of let them fail and make them write off their bad debt, that cleansed the banking industry and let Japan recover, if only temporarily. For a brief span, the Japanese economy recovered. But it wasn't long before the looting bureaucrats, the ruling daimyo of the LDP decided to sink their teeth into the only freshly rejuvenated business sector. First off was a crack-down on foreign-sourced investments, increased government intervention in mergers and sales of businesses. A raise in taxes, the dismantling of Livedoor, and the ongoing stink of corruption in Japanese politics all combined to nudge things back over the edge. This was happening well-before the housing meltdown in the US, despite what the pundits say. I know. I've been watching the news, and I have a fairly decent long-term memory. Nonetheless, America wants to charge right after Japan and do exactly the same wrong things they did. Nobody, except perhaps Jim Rogers and perhaps the far too splintered assortment of objectivists and libertarians out there has a real understanding of what needs to be done...or perhaps nobody else who's speaking...
Dismantle the FED. Dismantle the government's centralized banking scheme. This disaster, and the long string of disasters that have been happening for the last hundred years are all the direct result of government intervention. Think about it this way, did they have such a thing as unemployment in early days after the American revolution, when business was relatively unrestricted? No.
Yes, there were poor people and there were rich people. There will always be poor people and rich people. But the difference is that the classical American system enabled people to become rich by their own effort, with the fruits of their will. And with this freedom came the condemnation to poverty for the lack of effort. This is the principle of social justice. That those who do not strive to improve their lives shall not be able to, and that those who do, will be. Whether they will achieve personal happiness or not, is something which no government can ever promise, no human being can ever promise another. But the freedom to pursue happiness, the freedom to strive for it, to grasp for it, to work for it, matched with the opportunity to seize it if it is in your grasp---this is the freedom which drives the mind and hearts of men and women to do great things and to pull themselves up from the sordid depravity of apathetic resignation to misery which so characterizes life in the collectivist nations throughout history.
But you, who would preach that social justice must be meted out by the government, those of you who preach that we should all be held hostage to one man's vision of the future, to one man's dreams, even if he is selected by all of our neighbors, you preach a different creed. For how many years must we pay off the future? For how many years must the children of today be sacrificed for the phantoms of tomorrow? Whose vision is worth the slavery of a single man? A single woman? A single child? The founders of this country said that freedom was the heart and soul of value, that without freedom, there is no value to be had in society. That without freedom, we are slaves. And so we are.
'How can we be slaves?' you may ask. After all, are we not surrounded by art and entertainment to suit any fantasy? Are we not free to elect whoever we want for office? (Although the efforts to keep third-party candidates from participating in elections may cast some doubt on that premise.) What else would you call it when all of us must work as hard as we can to gather what resources we can to survive, but people come with the threat of imprisonment or violence to take what you have worked to bring into creation by force? The presumption is that the fruits of your labor are not yours. The presumption is that they belong to your master and that it is your master's will which has the right to decide how they are dispersed. Whether that master is one man who seized power, or if that master is a group of men who your neighbors have chosen to lead you, even if that master was chosen by you yourself--that does not grant them the moral right to your labor. If you grant others the moral right to dictate the terms of your work and the use of its products, then you grant them the moral right to treat you as a slave. And so we are treated. Groups of men and women gather to decide how they can divvy up the pie of American wealth without any consideration that they did nothing to create it, and have no moral claim to it. They cite legal precedent as the foundation of their right, common law borrowed from Europe.
What they neglect to recognize is that America's break from Europe was an ideological break, a moral break. The morality of Europe had led to the servitude of its citizenry and generations of feudal wars, alliances, treachery, and corruption. The strengths of America were the strengths of an emergent American morality, one which died stillborn for want of a voice to express it in terms detached from the old traditions of altruism. And altrusim has slowly choked that system of strength until America will soon fade into the ranks of other statist, socialist nations, chomping at the bit for a taste of world power. What could have once been a shining model of the glory of human liberation, is slippy into the murky, soiled, and shabby frame of a beggar whining about destiny. A nation of men and women who forged their own destiny with their bare hands, is being whipped and shaped into a nation of equivicators and rationalizers. Let reality be the final judge and arbiter of this debate, of this age-long struggle. Open your eyes and see that the tragedies in the headlines today are the culmination of thousands of years of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. For how long can we repeat those very same mistakes without realizing that the answer is to try something different, something which has not been tried, something which would set us all free to pursue our dreams to the extent of our abilities and fly as high as we are able? Why not try freedom? Why not try capitalism? Real capitalism. Not the watered down, hypocritical vacillation characterized by base opportunists like Greenspan. Real capitalism, like that envisioned by Ayn Rand (whom Greenspan betrayed the moment he joined the FED). Instead, is it really better to emulate a socially stagnant Japan or the disastrous economic policies of Soviet Russia?
Who pays for it? Who pays for it all? We all do. We are all victims in this, and some are both victim and victimizer. But we will all pay the price. Our children will pay it and their children. By supposedly working for the future we are instead signing our children over into a life of slavery, where their dreams will always be ranked second to the demands of any organized group of their neighbors. What's the price? The price is paid for in deserted store fronts. The price is paid in unemployment. The price is paid in disease and crime. The price for your slave-owner's paradise, is that everyone is enslaved, noone and everyone is master, and we all descend into poverty together. Or is it that you imagine yourself in the 'privileged' elite that won't have to muck about with all that. Well, I suppose an altruist like Warren Buffett would probably be the last to feel the effects of the meltdown. But when need and apathy has strained their functional capacity and drained the motivation of it's creative minds--it won't be long before the institutional foundations of businesses around the world come tumbling down like a cascading array of dominoes.
If you are still not convinced, if instead you are more than ever insistent that the only way to cure our current ails is to whip us into better and better shape, to force us at the point of the gun and demand our cooperation through violence, then you deserve everything that's coming down the line. Why? Because it's your choice. The ideas you promote, the people you elect have a tangible effect on the world we live in. You can either choose to make it a better world, one where people are freer and happier. Or you can prolong the suffering, dispense misery and condone the execution of the human soul. You WILL reap that which you sow.
So, it goes without saying that a lot of people are wondering what Obama is going to do with this mess when he gets into office. A lot of people, that is, except for me. That's because I know exactly what he's going to do. He's going to spend a lot of government money. He's going to give a lot of money to big business, of course not the same big business cronies that Bush has, he'll give it to his green frontier democratic buddies. They may very well let the car companies hang (as they really should) but I don't think they'll go through with it. The Democrats are too reliant on unionized labor. Although the only way they're going to be able to pay for all these bailouts and all the social programs they want to cram down our throats is to raise taxes. Or perhaps they'll just raise taxes on businesses and the rich. (As if that won't be even more of a reason for companies and rich people to put their money elsewhere). Or, like Bernanke and the incompetent quacks at the FED have already done, devalue the currency like there's no tomorrow.
0% interest rates are not a good thing. Printing money on 0% interest rates to "increase cash flow" is not a good thing. It has one tangible result. Yes, money increases. But the downside is that money is worth less. Or worthless as the case may be. Japan is still stuck with interest rates next to nothing after 20 years of recession. It took Koizumi and his aggressive stance of let them fail and make them write off their bad debt, that cleansed the banking industry and let Japan recover, if only temporarily. For a brief span, the Japanese economy recovered. But it wasn't long before the looting bureaucrats, the ruling daimyo of the LDP decided to sink their teeth into the only freshly rejuvenated business sector. First off was a crack-down on foreign-sourced investments, increased government intervention in mergers and sales of businesses. A raise in taxes, the dismantling of Livedoor, and the ongoing stink of corruption in Japanese politics all combined to nudge things back over the edge. This was happening well-before the housing meltdown in the US, despite what the pundits say. I know. I've been watching the news, and I have a fairly decent long-term memory. Nonetheless, America wants to charge right after Japan and do exactly the same wrong things they did. Nobody, except perhaps Jim Rogers and perhaps the far too splintered assortment of objectivists and libertarians out there has a real understanding of what needs to be done...or perhaps nobody else who's speaking...
Dismantle the FED. Dismantle the government's centralized banking scheme. This disaster, and the long string of disasters that have been happening for the last hundred years are all the direct result of government intervention. Think about it this way, did they have such a thing as unemployment in early days after the American revolution, when business was relatively unrestricted? No.
Yes, there were poor people and there were rich people. There will always be poor people and rich people. But the difference is that the classical American system enabled people to become rich by their own effort, with the fruits of their will. And with this freedom came the condemnation to poverty for the lack of effort. This is the principle of social justice. That those who do not strive to improve their lives shall not be able to, and that those who do, will be. Whether they will achieve personal happiness or not, is something which no government can ever promise, no human being can ever promise another. But the freedom to pursue happiness, the freedom to strive for it, to grasp for it, to work for it, matched with the opportunity to seize it if it is in your grasp---this is the freedom which drives the mind and hearts of men and women to do great things and to pull themselves up from the sordid depravity of apathetic resignation to misery which so characterizes life in the collectivist nations throughout history.
But you, who would preach that social justice must be meted out by the government, those of you who preach that we should all be held hostage to one man's vision of the future, to one man's dreams, even if he is selected by all of our neighbors, you preach a different creed. For how many years must we pay off the future? For how many years must the children of today be sacrificed for the phantoms of tomorrow? Whose vision is worth the slavery of a single man? A single woman? A single child? The founders of this country said that freedom was the heart and soul of value, that without freedom, there is no value to be had in society. That without freedom, we are slaves. And so we are.
'How can we be slaves?' you may ask. After all, are we not surrounded by art and entertainment to suit any fantasy? Are we not free to elect whoever we want for office? (Although the efforts to keep third-party candidates from participating in elections may cast some doubt on that premise.) What else would you call it when all of us must work as hard as we can to gather what resources we can to survive, but people come with the threat of imprisonment or violence to take what you have worked to bring into creation by force? The presumption is that the fruits of your labor are not yours. The presumption is that they belong to your master and that it is your master's will which has the right to decide how they are dispersed. Whether that master is one man who seized power, or if that master is a group of men who your neighbors have chosen to lead you, even if that master was chosen by you yourself--that does not grant them the moral right to your labor. If you grant others the moral right to dictate the terms of your work and the use of its products, then you grant them the moral right to treat you as a slave. And so we are treated. Groups of men and women gather to decide how they can divvy up the pie of American wealth without any consideration that they did nothing to create it, and have no moral claim to it. They cite legal precedent as the foundation of their right, common law borrowed from Europe.
What they neglect to recognize is that America's break from Europe was an ideological break, a moral break. The morality of Europe had led to the servitude of its citizenry and generations of feudal wars, alliances, treachery, and corruption. The strengths of America were the strengths of an emergent American morality, one which died stillborn for want of a voice to express it in terms detached from the old traditions of altruism. And altrusim has slowly choked that system of strength until America will soon fade into the ranks of other statist, socialist nations, chomping at the bit for a taste of world power. What could have once been a shining model of the glory of human liberation, is slippy into the murky, soiled, and shabby frame of a beggar whining about destiny. A nation of men and women who forged their own destiny with their bare hands, is being whipped and shaped into a nation of equivicators and rationalizers. Let reality be the final judge and arbiter of this debate, of this age-long struggle. Open your eyes and see that the tragedies in the headlines today are the culmination of thousands of years of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. For how long can we repeat those very same mistakes without realizing that the answer is to try something different, something which has not been tried, something which would set us all free to pursue our dreams to the extent of our abilities and fly as high as we are able? Why not try freedom? Why not try capitalism? Real capitalism. Not the watered down, hypocritical vacillation characterized by base opportunists like Greenspan. Real capitalism, like that envisioned by Ayn Rand (whom Greenspan betrayed the moment he joined the FED). Instead, is it really better to emulate a socially stagnant Japan or the disastrous economic policies of Soviet Russia?
Who pays for it? Who pays for it all? We all do. We are all victims in this, and some are both victim and victimizer. But we will all pay the price. Our children will pay it and their children. By supposedly working for the future we are instead signing our children over into a life of slavery, where their dreams will always be ranked second to the demands of any organized group of their neighbors. What's the price? The price is paid for in deserted store fronts. The price is paid in unemployment. The price is paid in disease and crime. The price for your slave-owner's paradise, is that everyone is enslaved, noone and everyone is master, and we all descend into poverty together. Or is it that you imagine yourself in the 'privileged' elite that won't have to muck about with all that. Well, I suppose an altruist like Warren Buffett would probably be the last to feel the effects of the meltdown. But when need and apathy has strained their functional capacity and drained the motivation of it's creative minds--it won't be long before the institutional foundations of businesses around the world come tumbling down like a cascading array of dominoes.
If you are still not convinced, if instead you are more than ever insistent that the only way to cure our current ails is to whip us into better and better shape, to force us at the point of the gun and demand our cooperation through violence, then you deserve everything that's coming down the line. Why? Because it's your choice. The ideas you promote, the people you elect have a tangible effect on the world we live in. You can either choose to make it a better world, one where people are freer and happier. Or you can prolong the suffering, dispense misery and condone the execution of the human soul. You WILL reap that which you sow.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
The War on Terror: Yaron Brook Hits the Nail on the Head
This is a really enlightening Q&A session featuring Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute. He has some comments here that go straight to the heart of many of the problems with the ongoing war on terror. Hope you enjoy it:
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=83KIY3rZ1yw
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=avUK9dCyW4Y
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=83KIY3rZ1yw
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=avUK9dCyW4Y
Friday, July 18, 2008
Pope John Paul II was an Atheist! -- Breaking News of a Startling Analysis
Yes, here it is. A brilliant piece of deductive reasoning using the deceased Pope's very own words to expose what must have been the ideology driving them. After watching this, there should be no doubt that the Pope, the figurehead of Catholicism was, indeed, an atheist. It's so rare to actually catch out one of the religious figureheads in giving away the game. I highly recommend this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P29YD5Yz6yk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P29YD5Yz6yk
Friday, July 11, 2008
A Decisive Argument Against Religion
This is a video posted by YouTube objectivist Nelapidae. He presents a stunningly clear, precise and cutting argument against faith. Enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQefreiEQOA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQefreiEQOA
Friday, June 6, 2008
Will You Spill the Blood of those You Love?
I was really moved when I saw this. Any religion, any culture, which casts a blind eye on this behavior or even worse condones it cannot be considered a peaceful one by any stretch of the imagination. You would seriously need to completely turn on end what it is you consider right and wrong. You would have to be worshiping death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KASoTdii9c
For more information on this issue, I'd like to refer you to an informative article over at National Geographic:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0212_020212_honorkilling.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KASoTdii9c
For more information on this issue, I'd like to refer you to an informative article over at National Geographic:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0212_020212_honorkilling.html
Sunday, June 1, 2008
The Myth of Religious Moderation
For today's blog I would like to direct you to the following two news stories:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24919800/
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139433
Now, the first seems to be forewarning of growing rivalries and tensions within Islam. The second seems to be saying that there are seeds of moderation growing within Islam, that may lead it to become a more truly peaceful religion than it is today.
So, what's the point? Which view do we take seriously? Is Islam inherently dangerous and growing more internally divided as rival fundamental viewpoints wage very active and real war against each other? Or is Islam inherently peaceful, with modern Islam hijacked by a rabble of renegades harnessing the gullible with their political rhetoric?
The answer, I think is to go to the facts. And go to the source. Just as you can look at the bible to see what views Christian moderates are promoting to fundamentalists as the word of God, so too can you go to the Koran to see what views the moderates are promoting to fundamentalists as the word of God.
Well, fact #1 and the elephant in the room is that the only difference between moderates and fundamentalists is how much of their holy book they take to be the unequivocal holy word of almighty God. Moderates cut out the nasty bits. Fundamentalists take it all whole. You could almost say that the moderates are hypocrites in that they purport to follow a religion based on a text which is supposedly mandated by God, yet they have the audacity to say that they know better than their own God which parts are really really God's will and which parts are not. Because of this latent hypocrisy, fundamentalism will always have the potential to rear its ugly head. This is not because they are hijacking an otherwise peaceful religion. Fundamentalist, by definition means one who is adhering to the fundamentals of the religion. As such, the most sincere devotees of a religion must always be fundamentalist. Moderates are, for the most part, moral cowards. They are those who know well enough that the morality encoded in the literal word of their holy book makes absolutely no sense in the modern world, and yet are so terrified of their version of an ethereal boogie-man in the sky that they lack the courage to renounce their faith and set about defending and encoding a modern moral truth.
This is the kicker and it's what will cobble the efforts of anybody who seeks to negotiate their religion into supposedly "passive" forms. As long as the religion honors a text which encodes violence and immorality as ideals, then the religion will always bear the seeds of violence and immorality. So, let's check the sources and see if the Koran, and for that matter the Bible encode violence and immorality.
(Numbers 31:7-18 NLT)
They attacked Midian just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed all the men. All five of the Midianite kings – Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba – died in the battle. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. Then the Israelite army captured the Midianite women and children and seized their cattle and flocks and all their wealth as plunder. They burned all the towns and villages where the Midianites had lived. After they had gathered the plunder and captives, both people and animals, they brought them all to Moses and Eleazar the priest, and to the whole community of Israel, which was camped on the plains of Moab beside the Jordan River, across from Jericho.
(Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB)
Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and posses the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants. (Isaiah 14:21 NAB)
The glory of Israel will fly away like a bird, for your children will die at birth or perish in the womb or never even be conceived. Even if your children do survive to grow up, I will take them from you. It will be a terrible day when I turn away and leave you alone. I have watched Israel become as beautiful and pleasant as Tyre. But now Israel will bring out her children to be slaughtered." O LORD, what should I request for your people? I will ask for wombs that don't give birth and breasts that give no milk. The LORD says, "All their wickedness began at Gilgal; there I began to hate them. I will drive them from my land because of their evil actions. I will love them no more because all their leaders are rebels. The people of Israel are stricken. Their roots are dried up; they will bear no more fruit. And if they give birth, I will slaughter their beloved children." (Hosea 9:11-16 NLT)
Now that we've dealt with the flower of Christianity, let's take a look at what the pleasant poetry of the Koran has in store for us.
And as for those who are guilty of an indecency from among your women, call to witnesses against them four (witnesses) from among you; then if they bear witness confine them to the houses until death takes them away or Allah opens some way for them.
Well, at least house arrest sure beats stoning. Let's see what else is in there...
Oh, wait a second, what's this?
And when Musa said to his people: O my people! you have surely been unjust to yourselves by taking the calf (for a god), therefore turn to your Creator (penitently), so kill your people, that is best for you with your Creator: so He turned to you (mercifully), for surely He is the Oft-returning (to mercy), the Merciful.
Oh, and this isn't so friendly:
They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
And this:
You will find others who desire that they should be safe from you and secure from their own people; as often as they are sent back to the mischief they get thrown into it headlong; therefore if they do not withdraw from you, and (do not) offer you peace and restrain their hands, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them; and against these We have given.you a clear authority.
And do not kill any one whom Allah has forbidden, except for a just cause, and whoever is slain unjustly, We have indeed given to his heir authority, so let him not exceed the just limits in slaying; surely he is aided.
I wonder what qualifies as a "just cause"? Fighting for the glory of Allah?
Say: Have you considered if the chastisement of Allah should overtake you suddenly or openly, will any be destroyed but the unjust people?
I guess that answers that question, doesn't it?
And when We wish to destroy a town, We send Our commandment to the people of it who lead easy lives, but they transgress therein; thus the word proves true against it, so We destroy it with utter destruction.
Mmmm....peaceful......
Then We said: Go you both to the people who rejected Our communications; so We destroyed them with utter destruction.
And some even more destroying with utter destruction goodness:
And to every one We gave examples and every one did We destroy with utter destruction.
Like we need to make it dead, really really dead. Dancing on the dead, dead, hyper-deading dead dead. But, who really has time to sift through all this crap. If you would like, there is a searchable online Koran which is where I got all these lovely quotes. All you need to do is search for things like destroy, kill, etc. In all fairness, there was no mention of rape that I could find, so perhaps the Muslims do have a moral leg up on Christianity after all. But as for being a peaceful religion? No, I don't think so.
The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement,
O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).
(And in case you were wondering where I got all the juicy Bible quotes, they're from EvilBible.com. )
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24919800/
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139433
Now, the first seems to be forewarning of growing rivalries and tensions within Islam. The second seems to be saying that there are seeds of moderation growing within Islam, that may lead it to become a more truly peaceful religion than it is today.
So, what's the point? Which view do we take seriously? Is Islam inherently dangerous and growing more internally divided as rival fundamental viewpoints wage very active and real war against each other? Or is Islam inherently peaceful, with modern Islam hijacked by a rabble of renegades harnessing the gullible with their political rhetoric?
The answer, I think is to go to the facts. And go to the source. Just as you can look at the bible to see what views Christian moderates are promoting to fundamentalists as the word of God, so too can you go to the Koran to see what views the moderates are promoting to fundamentalists as the word of God.
Well, fact #1 and the elephant in the room is that the only difference between moderates and fundamentalists is how much of their holy book they take to be the unequivocal holy word of almighty God. Moderates cut out the nasty bits. Fundamentalists take it all whole. You could almost say that the moderates are hypocrites in that they purport to follow a religion based on a text which is supposedly mandated by God, yet they have the audacity to say that they know better than their own God which parts are really really God's will and which parts are not. Because of this latent hypocrisy, fundamentalism will always have the potential to rear its ugly head. This is not because they are hijacking an otherwise peaceful religion. Fundamentalist, by definition means one who is adhering to the fundamentals of the religion. As such, the most sincere devotees of a religion must always be fundamentalist. Moderates are, for the most part, moral cowards. They are those who know well enough that the morality encoded in the literal word of their holy book makes absolutely no sense in the modern world, and yet are so terrified of their version of an ethereal boogie-man in the sky that they lack the courage to renounce their faith and set about defending and encoding a modern moral truth.
This is the kicker and it's what will cobble the efforts of anybody who seeks to negotiate their religion into supposedly "passive" forms. As long as the religion honors a text which encodes violence and immorality as ideals, then the religion will always bear the seeds of violence and immorality. So, let's check the sources and see if the Koran, and for that matter the Bible encode violence and immorality.
(Numbers 31:7-18 NLT)
They attacked Midian just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed all the men. All five of the Midianite kings – Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba – died in the battle. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. Then the Israelite army captured the Midianite women and children and seized their cattle and flocks and all their wealth as plunder. They burned all the towns and villages where the Midianites had lived. After they had gathered the plunder and captives, both people and animals, they brought them all to Moses and Eleazar the priest, and to the whole community of Israel, which was camped on the plains of Moab beside the Jordan River, across from Jericho.
Moses, Eleazar the priest, and all the leaders of the people went to meet them outside the camp. But Moses was furious with all the military commanders who had returned from the battle. "Why have you let all the women live?" he demanded. "These are the very ones who followed Balaam's advice and caused the people of Israel to rebel against the LORD at Mount Peor. They are the ones who caused the plague to strike the LORD's people. Now kill all the boys and all the women who have slept with a man. Only the young girls who are virgins may live; you may keep them for yourselves.
OK, you may say, but that's in a time of war and we all know that war is hell, right? So how about rape about town?(Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB)
If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbors wife.
Well, that seems pretty damn evil to me. But even if we just take that as hardcore justice, let's clarify what God thinks about some other stuff. How about child killing? I think we can all pretty much agree that there is nothing more evil than someone who hurts children willfully.Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and posses the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants. (Isaiah 14:21 NAB)
The glory of Israel will fly away like a bird, for your children will die at birth or perish in the womb or never even be conceived. Even if your children do survive to grow up, I will take them from you. It will be a terrible day when I turn away and leave you alone. I have watched Israel become as beautiful and pleasant as Tyre. But now Israel will bring out her children to be slaughtered." O LORD, what should I request for your people? I will ask for wombs that don't give birth and breasts that give no milk. The LORD says, "All their wickedness began at Gilgal; there I began to hate them. I will drive them from my land because of their evil actions. I will love them no more because all their leaders are rebels. The people of Israel are stricken. Their roots are dried up; they will bear no more fruit. And if they give birth, I will slaughter their beloved children." (Hosea 9:11-16 NLT)
"Then I heard the LORD say to the other men, "Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all – old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin your task right here at the Temple." So they began by killing the seventy leaders. "Defile the Temple!" the LORD commanded. "Fill its courtyards with the bodies of those you kill! Go!" So they went throughout the city and did as they were told." (Ezekiel 9:5-7 NLT)
And at midnight the LORD killed all the firstborn sons in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn son of the captive in the dungeon. Even the firstborn of their livestock were killed. Pharaoh and his officials and all the people of Egypt woke up during the night, and loud wailing was heard throughout the land of Egypt. There was not a single house where someone had not died. (Exodus 12:29-30 NLT)
If even then you remain hostile toward me and refuse to obey, I will inflict you with seven more disasters for your sins. I will release wild animals that will kill your children and destroy your cattle, so your numbers will dwindle and your roads will be deserted. (Leviticus 26:21-22 NLT)
Anyone who is captured will be run through with a sword. Their little children will be dashed to death right before their eyes. Their homes will be sacked and their wives raped by the attacking hordes. For I will stir up the Medes against Babylon, and no amount of silver or gold will buy them off. The attacking armies will shoot down the young people with arrows. They will have no mercy on helpless babies and will show no compassion for the children. (Isaiah 13:15-18 NLT)
Now that we've dealt with the flower of Christianity, let's take a look at what the pleasant poetry of the Koran has in store for us.
And as for those who are guilty of an indecency from among your women, call to witnesses against them four (witnesses) from among you; then if they bear witness confine them to the houses until death takes them away or Allah opens some way for them.
Well, at least house arrest sure beats stoning. Let's see what else is in there...
Oh, wait a second, what's this?
And when Musa said to his people: O my people! you have surely been unjust to yourselves by taking the calf (for a god), therefore turn to your Creator (penitently), so kill your people, that is best for you with your Creator: so He turned to you (mercifully), for surely He is the Oft-returning (to mercy), the Merciful.
Oh, and this isn't so friendly:
They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
And this:
You will find others who desire that they should be safe from you and secure from their own people; as often as they are sent back to the mischief they get thrown into it headlong; therefore if they do not withdraw from you, and (do not) offer you peace and restrain their hands, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them; and against these We have given.you a clear authority.
And do not kill any one whom Allah has forbidden, except for a just cause, and whoever is slain unjustly, We have indeed given to his heir authority, so let him not exceed the just limits in slaying; surely he is aided.
I wonder what qualifies as a "just cause"? Fighting for the glory of Allah?
Say: Have you considered if the chastisement of Allah should overtake you suddenly or openly, will any be destroyed but the unjust people?
I guess that answers that question, doesn't it?
And when We wish to destroy a town, We send Our commandment to the people of it who lead easy lives, but they transgress therein; thus the word proves true against it, so We destroy it with utter destruction.
Mmmm....peaceful......
Then We said: Go you both to the people who rejected Our communications; so We destroyed them with utter destruction.
And some even more destroying with utter destruction goodness:
And to every one We gave examples and every one did We destroy with utter destruction.
Like we need to make it dead, really really dead. Dancing on the dead, dead, hyper-deading dead dead. But, who really has time to sift through all this crap. If you would like, there is a searchable online Koran which is where I got all these lovely quotes. All you need to do is search for things like destroy, kill, etc. In all fairness, there was no mention of rape that I could find, so perhaps the Muslims do have a moral leg up on Christianity after all. But as for being a peaceful religion? No, I don't think so.
The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement,
O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).
(And in case you were wondering where I got all the juicy Bible quotes, they're from EvilBible.com. )
Sunday, May 25, 2008
A Further Defense Against Koenichfuerst
For the story thus far see this link:
http://anamericananti-theistabroad.blogspot.com/2008/05/rebuttal-to-some-arguments-against.html
and then this link for his counter-argument:
http://koenichfuerst.blogspot.com/2008/05/rebuttal-of-rebuttal.html
Now, to get down to business.
1. By stating that "Existence exists" is a tautology, you are stating that existence is something which is. If existence is something which can possibly not be, then "existence exists" is not necessarily a tautology. It could then be wrong. If, however, you state that existence must by definition exist, and therefore be a tautology, then you have conceded that existence does indeed exist. You can't have it both ways. You concede that you don't believe that you're in the matrix, so basically you're arguing a moot point. There isn't anything debatable about it. What is, is. It's purely a statement of identity. It is not an argument. How you can hope to disprove the identity of everything around you, is a matter for you and your grasp of reality to work out. For anybody else, it is clear that the very fact that we are having this debate is proof that we have both accepted that there is a common experience of existence through which we can negotiate meaning. The very use of language or any communication medium, presupposes that there is a common reality external to us both through which we are communicating.
You have yet to offer any counter to this except to say, well, "It doesn't have to be that way." To which I shall reply thus: If there isn't then there is no point to our even debating. Because I am then just a figment of your imagination. As is the whole universe. And while it may be comforting to place yourself at the center of a delusional dream-world, it runs against the entire scope of scientific knowledge. If you want to argue that existence is debatable and therefore not a given, then you must take the opposing stance that existence is not real. But if you do so, then you lose the ability to use science as a justification. Since all science is built on the presupposition that what you are measuring is measurable by others in the same way and with significantly replicable results. This is something which would not hold in a largely subjective universe.
1.2 Hofstadter's points on free will are on pages 710-714 of the 1999 paperback version of Godel, Escher, Bach. He lays out how what we consider free will could be expressed in terms of how a self-referential self aware system may perceive its choices. He also states that it is not intuitive and it may be one of those things which is not intuitively comprehensible. The long and the short of it is though that these cycles of self-referential mechanistic systems would give rise to the phenomenon that we perceive as free will, namely our ability to choose between courses of action. This is in effect what free will is all about.
Of course this argument is well after Rand's, so she couldn't draw on these concepts in the expression of her philosophy. But the practical upshot is that free-will is rendered explainable in a mechanistic view of the universe. Hofstadter does not remove "our" responsibility for making decisions. Especially as the cumulative effect of what "I" comes to mean in this perspective of consciousness is the meta (meta-meta? meta-meta-meta?) level of the system of which we are aware. It by no means removes from people the option of choice, anymore than the knowledge that atoms are mostly empty space removes us from the restriction on not falling through the earth or walking through walls. It is simply a 'quantum' level explanation of consciousness and free-will, where it comes from, so to speak.
2. Your argument on ethics once again does not go deep enough, and I think it's interesting that you consciously avoided referencing Rand's footnote to that quote, which I will restate, properly quoted. As you say, Virtue of Selfishness, p. 16-17.
"Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex--from the nutritive function in the single cell of the amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man--are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism's life.*"
To which I now add, the footnote (italics in the original):
"When applied to physical phenomenon, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term "goal-directed" is not to be taken to mean "purposive" (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term "goal-directed," in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism's life."
Her argument then is that since man is not born with automatic 'knowledge' of how to sustain his life, then he must discover it. That is to say, that the genetic programming of animals seems to provide them the skills necessary to survive in their environment, but that man's genetic programming does not seem to have this information hard-wired in.
Because of this, man has to choose, has to learn. There is no necessity in man choosing values which will lead it to a full, healthy, and rewarding existence. However, choosing the right values, will. Values guide a person's long term goals. If that value is life, then the long-term goals of a person will be the preservation and elevation of that life. If the value is death, well then that is also another option. But happiness, is only possible by choosing life as a value. Choosing death as a value leads to pain, because death is painful.
You're also neglecting that Rand states that organisms incapable of choice cannot have values, as such. Once again, I quote from The Objectivist Ethics, VOS, p. 16.
""Value" is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept "value" is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible."
As for your spurious accounts of the animal world, you have yet to provide an example of a creature which consciously works against its own survival genetically or otherwise. Unless that you are arguing that something with the brain the size of a praying mantis or a peacock is conscious enough to have values, then those examples still stand invalidated.
As for Zahavi's hypothesis that some animals display colorfully precisely because it is dangerous and thus makes them more appealing to females, mathematical modeling by Alan Grafen has shown that this may possibly lead to an evolutionarily stable state and may well be an adequate explanation of such behavior. But I stress again that the goal is to live and pass on one's genes. The display is a result of both the pressures for survival and the pressures to reproduce acting in concert on the genetic make-up of the animal and it's mode of behavior. The peacock is successful in mating because it is good enough to survive in spite of it's tail. If it were to be a handicap that guaranteed death then it would not be able to reproduce. If anything it makes it that much harder for the peacock to survive, but it does not entail that the peacock is not directed to survive by the same forces which drive all other animals. It has simply developed to respond to the pressure on its evolution in unique ways.
3. The "is-ought" gap.
Virtue of Selfishness, p.17
"Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism's life.
An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means--and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.
Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into infinte progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It it only an ultimate goal, an end in itself that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of "value" is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of "life". To speak of "value" as apart from "life" is worse than a contradiction in terms. "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible."
In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of the ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between "is" and "ought." "
And if that isn't clear enough, let me connect the dots.
1. To have values, one must have choice, so one must be conscious.
2. If a conscious organism wishes to continue surviving then it must choose life as it's ultimate value. Especially as human beings are not hard-wired with values, or knowledge of how best to survive, this is not a default choice. Humans must reason in order to solve the problems of survival. Reason is an active process, actively decided upon.
3. If a being chooses survival, and therefore life as a value to be pursued, then the facts of reality dictate what it should do in order to pursue that goal effectively. Every "is" therefore implies an "ought".
The argument for objectivist ethics doesn't rest on the desires of animals. It rests on the necessary consequences of what values a conscious being sets . Of the ultimate goal it decides to pursue. And on the influence of the environment in which we live (i.e. existence) on what is necessary to ensure survival. There's nothing arbitrary about it at all. Unless you wish to choose death as your ultimate value, then you are welcome to it. Let's see how far that gets you.
I apologize on the Albert Ellis criticism. Like I said, I am not well-versed in his theories. I might point out, however, that the "reference" to objectivism was not in the article proper (actually none was) it was merely the title of a book in the bibliography which was phrased as a question and provided no indication of his stance on the matter.
So, in all fairness, I researched Ellis's views in more depth. Well, the first thing I noticed is that Ellis does not seem to be in the mainstream with regards to the psychological evaluation of the value of self-esteem and self-worth. While I would agree that it would be destructive to deify Rand as some are wont to do, this is not something promoted by her philosophy in and of itself. It is the misguided knee-jerk reaction of some of her followers. And just as ad hominem attacks do nothing to disprove a theory in any other field, they do little to provide serious criticism in philosophy or psychology either.
I will fully concede that Ayn Rand was capable of making wrong decisions, that she did not have all facts, as not even science has all facts. But the framework she laid out for her philosophical system was rational, just as the empirical assumptions which drive the scientific method are rational. They are consistent with what we know of reality today, just as they were then. The concept of our ethics being determined by the facts of our existence and our happiness being determined by our individual natures in the details, but overall by the biological necessities of our survival is a solid one. The details and arguments of merit are therefore, those which focus on what is indeed our nature as human beings, and what are indeed the facts of our existence.
You will get nowhere by challenging notions of existence or of survival. These are well accepted concepts in the sciences. You can continue beating a straw man if you wish, but I fail to see the merit in it and shall waste no more time trying to disprove you of this notion.
If you can come up with a truly scientific argument that supports your claim, then please spell it out explicitly and I will take it on. But I have a limit to how many times I can reiterate the same argument.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Fighting the Good Fight
Here's a promotional video from the National Center for Science Education. It shows how they proved that Intelligent Design is really Creationism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUB8Mv1SaKQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUB8Mv1SaKQ
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Scientology: The Devil Next Door
Here's an interesting and informative video on the new-age fanatical religion founded by American SF writer L. Ron Hubbard. I also highly recommend Thunderfoot's entire, Why Do People Laugh at Creationists? series.
Here's the link to the Scientology video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuHF_br-DBs
And here is Thunderfoot's proposed battle plan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6eNyBrQUKs
And here is a justification of Thunderfoot's Scientology = Nazi analogy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYG5ayrd040
Here's the link to the Scientology video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuHF_br-DBs
And here is Thunderfoot's proposed battle plan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6eNyBrQUKs
And here is a justification of Thunderfoot's Scientology = Nazi analogy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYG5ayrd040
Will You Let Your School Murder Your Child's Mind?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24761899/
This is truly terrifying. What are these teachers thinking? What are the parents thinking? Why are these teachers still working? They should be fired for child abuse. School is not to indoctrinate our children with religious propaganda. Even worse, if they come away from these classes believing in creationism, believing that the world is less than 10,000 years old...then they are basically being handicapped from any career in the sciences.
Scientists cannot afford to accept arbitrary judgments at face value. And by saying that there is even a shred of respectability to the ideas of creationists, then those teachers are gutting their students' ability to make valid scientific judgments. There is no proof of ID. There is no proof of creationism. Teaching it as part of a science course flies in the face of everything that science is about.
Teachers have a responsibility to teach children how to reason critically. It is a skill which is essential to negotiating one's way through life. Without it, children are malleable, controllable, programmable creatures with no notion of what ideas are worth accepting and which are worth rejecting. Well...I guess that makes it pretty easy to see what the creationists want. They don't want truth, religious or otherwise. They want a world of slaves.
Fight this! If you are aware of this going on at your children's schools, fight it or face the reality that your child is being set up for a blue collar job in a propaganda state. Go to the school board! Go to the newspaper! Scream bloody murder until these irresponsible and vicious abusers of children's minds are kicked out of academia and back into the pulpits where they belong. After all it's your child's future. Are you willing to throw it away for the sake of whim and superstition?
This is truly terrifying. What are these teachers thinking? What are the parents thinking? Why are these teachers still working? They should be fired for child abuse. School is not to indoctrinate our children with religious propaganda. Even worse, if they come away from these classes believing in creationism, believing that the world is less than 10,000 years old...then they are basically being handicapped from any career in the sciences.
Scientists cannot afford to accept arbitrary judgments at face value. And by saying that there is even a shred of respectability to the ideas of creationists, then those teachers are gutting their students' ability to make valid scientific judgments. There is no proof of ID. There is no proof of creationism. Teaching it as part of a science course flies in the face of everything that science is about.
Teachers have a responsibility to teach children how to reason critically. It is a skill which is essential to negotiating one's way through life. Without it, children are malleable, controllable, programmable creatures with no notion of what ideas are worth accepting and which are worth rejecting. Well...I guess that makes it pretty easy to see what the creationists want. They don't want truth, religious or otherwise. They want a world of slaves.
Fight this! If you are aware of this going on at your children's schools, fight it or face the reality that your child is being set up for a blue collar job in a propaganda state. Go to the school board! Go to the newspaper! Scream bloody murder until these irresponsible and vicious abusers of children's minds are kicked out of academia and back into the pulpits where they belong. After all it's your child's future. Are you willing to throw it away for the sake of whim and superstition?
Monday, May 19, 2008
Free Trade and Political Spin
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24695933/
This article is a fairly even-handed and thoughtful explanation of the way in which free trade between nations actually helps people in the working class and not just the movers and shakers.
It's easy to forget sometimes, what with all the political and media spin on the marketplace. It's easy to forget because Obama and Clinton spout off about how they want to help the little guy by gutting 'big bad' business. They never stop to think that 'big bad' business is what is giving the little guy a job to do. If they make it harder for businesses to set up in the US, then they will go abroad. It's that simple.
Free trade makes sense, but a free economy at home makes even more sense. Just imagine how much prices would drop if there weren't tariffs, taxes, and surcharges latched on to everything. Of course, the reason why people don't realize this is because they're hopelessly dedicated to the morality of altruism. They think that making money for yourself is evil, so they want to make it as hard to make money as possible. What people don't realize is that if you can't make money, you can't live. So which do you want? A new morality that will let you make money and feel good about it? Or the old morality which will drive you to die for a notion of good which makes it impossible to live?
You decide. After all the choice is only yours.
This article is a fairly even-handed and thoughtful explanation of the way in which free trade between nations actually helps people in the working class and not just the movers and shakers.
It's easy to forget sometimes, what with all the political and media spin on the marketplace. It's easy to forget because Obama and Clinton spout off about how they want to help the little guy by gutting 'big bad' business. They never stop to think that 'big bad' business is what is giving the little guy a job to do. If they make it harder for businesses to set up in the US, then they will go abroad. It's that simple.
Free trade makes sense, but a free economy at home makes even more sense. Just imagine how much prices would drop if there weren't tariffs, taxes, and surcharges latched on to everything. Of course, the reason why people don't realize this is because they're hopelessly dedicated to the morality of altruism. They think that making money for yourself is evil, so they want to make it as hard to make money as possible. What people don't realize is that if you can't make money, you can't live. So which do you want? A new morality that will let you make money and feel good about it? Or the old morality which will drive you to die for a notion of good which makes it impossible to live?
You decide. After all the choice is only yours.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Yet Another Pastor Who Proves How Moral Religion Is
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24686805/
Yep, the above article is another vivid portrait of just how effective religion is at keeping our society on a moral course. I mean really, if preachers, pastors, holy men cannot be led to a path of moral righteousness by their devotion to religion, then just how is it that they expect it to keep the rest of the world on a moral footing? Isn't this just one more proof of how morality has nothing to do with religion?
Morality is a choice. It is a framework of choices built upon values. And a person's values are what make them either good or evil. God cannot save you, because there is none. Belief in god cannot make you moral. Understanding WHY something is wrong is what makes one moral. And you don't have to be religious to understand why it's wrong to solicit little girls on the internet (Baptist), rape choir boys (Catholic), or sentence rape victims to death because they commit adultery (Islam).
What you have to do to be moral is to THINK about your actions, to THINK about your values, and to THINK about what values are good for yourself in the long term. If you really think about these things then you will find that moral decisions are easy. But you will also lose the pleasant reassurance that your evil will be forgiven. Evil cannot be forgiven. The best you can do is to work to undo the damage you have done and never do it again. In the worst cases where there is no sign of rehabilitation or remorse, or where compensation is impossible, you must be removed from the company of civilized men and women forever. There is no easy way out of your responsibility. If this seems harsh, then let it be a warning to whoever would shirk the awareness of their own actions. Ignorance of morality is not a defense. Defaulting to religious doctrine to defend you is not a defense. You must KNOW whether your actions are right are wrong. And if you still do evil things then all will KNOW that you are evil.
Yep, the above article is another vivid portrait of just how effective religion is at keeping our society on a moral course. I mean really, if preachers, pastors, holy men cannot be led to a path of moral righteousness by their devotion to religion, then just how is it that they expect it to keep the rest of the world on a moral footing? Isn't this just one more proof of how morality has nothing to do with religion?
Morality is a choice. It is a framework of choices built upon values. And a person's values are what make them either good or evil. God cannot save you, because there is none. Belief in god cannot make you moral. Understanding WHY something is wrong is what makes one moral. And you don't have to be religious to understand why it's wrong to solicit little girls on the internet (Baptist), rape choir boys (Catholic), or sentence rape victims to death because they commit adultery (Islam).
What you have to do to be moral is to THINK about your actions, to THINK about your values, and to THINK about what values are good for yourself in the long term. If you really think about these things then you will find that moral decisions are easy. But you will also lose the pleasant reassurance that your evil will be forgiven. Evil cannot be forgiven. The best you can do is to work to undo the damage you have done and never do it again. In the worst cases where there is no sign of rehabilitation or remorse, or where compensation is impossible, you must be removed from the company of civilized men and women forever. There is no easy way out of your responsibility. If this seems harsh, then let it be a warning to whoever would shirk the awareness of their own actions. Ignorance of morality is not a defense. Defaulting to religious doctrine to defend you is not a defense. You must KNOW whether your actions are right are wrong. And if you still do evil things then all will KNOW that you are evil.
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