Leonid

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    Leonid Fainberg
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  1. The "high seas" are traditionally held to be in the common, at least those portions of the seas which are so far from land they cannot be restricted or closed to traffic. There is no need of restriction or closure. The user will simply pay to the owner.
  2. "Rivers and Oceans by their very nature are in the Commons of Nature. How can a River be fenced other than by blocking it. Also peeing in a River is an act of aggression against the downstream folk. Large bodies of water must be left in Commons else wars will erupt over them" Nevertheless they can become a property owned by certain people. Rivers, seas and oceans could be equally divided between the the total population of the earth and everybody could own a piece of it, which is quite a large piece. If anybody wants to exploit a certain area he could by it from the owner or rent it. In this way the exploitation of the seas will increase the global wealth tremendously.
  3. Ayn Rand said that in the capitalist society all property should be privately owned. She never said that every spot of land should be private. According to the Oxford Dictionary " Property is a thing or things owned". Some pieces of land or rivers are not owned by anybody and therefore they are not property. Oceans and seas for example are not property. But if somebody will start to exploit part of the sea, it will become a property, own by the person who does that. What Ayn Rand objected to is a notion of public property. She called it a collectivist fiction.
  4. From Objectivist point of view view one cannot actually separate entity from its attributes. Nothing can exist as nothing in particular. " A thing is—what it is; its characteristics constitute its identity. An existent apart from its characteristics, would be an existent apart from its identity, which means: a nothing, a non-existent." ITOE 142
  5. Infidel "Yep, a religion with a leader who said that he glimpsed hell and it was mostly populated by women." And heaven as well. Remember 72 virgins? Actually Mohammed was a first Arab leader who granted some rights to women. Before him they had been really treated as a cattle. In the 6th century AD the concept of rights didn't exist at all-for men or women. In any case not Qur'an, nor hadit endorse such a treatment.
  6. "-I think many Popes have been atheists--for several reasons,"-you mean hypocrites or simply fraudsters?
  7. Hellen:"Also puzzling is your citing as evidence for your claim an article that appeared three days after you made the claim. Did you know in advance that the Principia Scientific article was going to be published?" No, this is a pure coincident. I've seen the critique of the article as well. It confirms my position that we are dealing with not scientific but political problem, for the reason that on the basis of such a controversial factual evidence politicians make decisions which affect lives of billions. The global warming is simply a disguise for the quest for global political domination.
  8. On what evidence do you conclude this is true? The evidence is your ability to ask this question or even to deny your own consciousness and volition.
  9. Helen: "I wonder where you get the "fact" that AGW "has been refuted as false." I expect the worldwide network of alarmism skeptics would be pleased at the news that they can all cease their efforts now." Here: http://principia-scientific.org/supportnews/latest-news/163-new-discovery-nasa-study-proves-carbon-dioxide-cools-atmosphere.html#.UV
  10. "man is a being of volitional consciousness." and that exactly what I mean
  11. So strictly speaking it's ireland til you get there and then it's the Emerald Isle? Emerald Isle, Ireland, Eire, Airlann designate the same thing-an island to the north-west of continental Europe. Don't get what you exactly mean.
  12. You can bbm to me as well . pin 26586DF0
  13. No, I don't mean that. I read your query a few days ago and have been periodically trying and failing to imagine where you might get that meaning. I think the language difficulty is maybe insuperable. However, while puzzling, I began to be disturbed by my own wording, which was -- in post #126: "not adequately grounded in evidence to require checking out for truth or falsity". The problem I'm seeing is that "require" could imply something I don't mean, in both directions. It might seem to imply that one is required to check out the truth or falsity of all assertions or hypotheses which are presented with sufficient evidence. But doing such extensive checking would be an impossibly prodigous task. Instead what's required for responsible epistemology is an understanding in principle of how testing can be done and reason to think that it has been done with assertions or hypotheses one accepts as definitely or provisionally true. In the daily course of events, with mundane statements, such checking is made so quickly as often not to be noticed. On the other hand, my wording might seem to imply that there's never a requirement to check assertions or hypotheses which aren't "adequately grounded in evidence." (An aside: I'm aware that what counts as "adequately grounded" can sometimes be a judgment call and debatable.) There are cases where scrutiny is important despite a lack of supporting evidence. Depends on what's at stake in accepting the assertion or hypothesis as if it were supported. For example, the extensive abritrary claims made in the anthropogenic global warming issue can lead to and have led to expensive policy decisions, along with harm to the integrity of scientific procedure. So drawing attention to the arbitrariness is important. An example of general importance for people interested in Objectivism is Rand's habit of making ostensively factual assertions which she didn't support. An interesting project would be to try to do a count of the number of such assertions in her writings, starting with the major claim in Galt's Speech that "man is a being of volitional consciousness." An instance I've been thinking about recently, since I've been rereading Robert Cambell's essay "The Peikovian Doctrine of the Arbitrary Assertion," comes from Rand's last Ford Hall Forum talk, "The Age of Mediocrity," and is quoted in Robert's essay (pg. 100): What is Rand's evidence for the "psychologizing" (by her own definition) claim in the last sentence? How would she know that the reasons given by people who want creationist accounts of species origins to be included in school curricula aren't sincere reasons? She provides no indication. Likewise, she supplies no indicative hint regarding where she'd "read a lot of valid evidence to support" the theory of evolution. Citing some sources by name wouldn't have added that much length to the statement and would have provided a degree of basis for listeners/readers to have a clue as to what she was taking to be "valid evidence." Also, we can't really tell even what she means by "the theory of evolution," that theory not being monolithic. Because of examples like the above -- ones in which there's reason to consider claims which are "arbitrary" by my meaning -- I think a better way of stating that meaning would be: "not adequately grounded in evidence to merit taking seriously as a truth claim". One might have reason to take the claim seriously because of the context in which it's made despite its not having enough evidential support provided to merit its being taken seriously. Ellen Leonid: "Do you mean that any assertion could be checked for truth or falsity, even if such an assertion doesn't pertain to existence?" Helen: "No, I don't mean that." So in fact you have no argument with Peikoff. You just don't want to call such assertions by the name "arbitrary". But that already matter of semantics. As far as I concern , the problem is not which assertions one should check but which assertions could be dismissed or accepted without any further investigation. There are two kinds of them-1. An arbitrary assertions which evidently defy axioms, logic, proven knowledge and common sense. They should be rejected on the blink of eye. 2. The self evident axiomatic truths-like " man is volitional being", or "man is conscious being" or " existence exists". They cannot be proved, since all proves are based on them. Their rejection is self-refuting and they should be accepted without any further investigation. A substitution of scientific theory, no matter how incomplete it is by religious belief is an attack on the man's mind by definition. Why you call it " "psychologizing"? And man-made global warming hypothesis is not arbitrary by any means. As a matter of fact it has been refuted as false and by definition one cannot refute arbitrary assertion.
  14. Heh. And what specific action of Branden's was considered a "personal and philosophical betrayal"? Why, it was his having an affair with with someone other than Rand! It was his falling in love with someone whom Rand had rated as a stupid "shop girl," while Rand remained married to someone who was, by any objective standard of measurement, less accomplished and worthy of romantic attention than the "shop girl." It's interesting that her marriage to Frank, and her remaining married to him after she found a real-life Roark or Galt in Branden, wasn't considered a betrayal of her philosophy. I think that Rand was extremely jealous of Branden's preferring Patrecia -- his being turned on by her while, in comparison, being turned off by Rand. J I suppose that all these question you should have ask Ayn Rand. Only she knew the real value of Frank. And on what base you concluded that Frank "was, by any objective standard of measurement, less accomplished and worthy of romantic attention than the "shop girl." ? Is that why Ayn Rand dedicated " Atlas Shrugged" to him?