DavidMcK

You might remember Kip's name from his even more famous mother ' Kip's Ma ' who was into soybeans, and was responsible for diverting freight trains to CA for the great soybean harvest right when they were most needed in MN for the grain harvest. The acorn didn't fall too far from the soybean did it?

This post seems so phony to me, the misspelled words (new for knew, etc.) Why would someone come on here to dis 'Anthem' knowing that most of us love Ayn Rand's works? And he has trouble getting people to read Anthem? I know people who don't like Ayn Rand at all who still respond to Anthem.

Great reply phil (#149), nothing like diffusing the harshness of others with a great sense of humor. Some of us have been fascinated with this thread.

Hi Ashley, and welcome.

harridan: n. A woman regarded as scolding and vicious. (from the free online dictionary) A new word for me!

I've been seeing posters for something called 'robinhood.org ' in the NY subways: it is an organization that provides food for the poor, and can't help noticing that they are so confused they don't know the difference between asking for volunteer donations and stealing.

Selene: In answer to your request for sourcing the Goldwater nuke position; Sorry it took so long to reply but I lost track of this topic with the changes and a lack of interest in Palin. The source I have is from Brian Doherty's 'Radicals for Capitalism': " And despite his (sophistic) declarations that he never, never, never called for a nuclear war against the Soviets, even the most charitable of readers would find it difficult to figure out whatever he might have meant in Conscience about the commies if he didn't mean that." The footnote (#59 chapter 6) goes on to make numerous quotes from The Conscience Of a Conservative including: 'In addition to parrying [the Soviets'] blows, we must strike our own. In addition to guarding our frontiers, we must try to puncture his. In addition to keeping the free world free, we must try to make the Communist world free. To these ends, we must always try to engage the enemy at times and places, and with weapons, of our own choosing" and "We should make every effort to achieve decisive superiority in small, clean nuclear weapons".

"The Chrysler bankruptcy showed how the secured lenders got swindled out of their contractual rights under bankruptcy law by government intervention. The GM bankruptcy illustrates biased treatment of an unsecured creditor due to government edict. Both these events violate the basic rules of a free market and the rule of law, which are the basic precepts of our founding fathers and our democracy. In a conventional Chapter 11 bankruptcy, unsecured creditors are all in the same position and are usually treated by the court in a similar way, depending on their risk level and their importance to the company's survival. In the GM case, there are three unsecured creditors in question, the bondholders (pension funds, hedge funds, investors) who bought these bonds from brokers, the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) who are owed money by GM as a result of the retiree health benefit trust set up by the company, and the U.S. Treasury who recently shelled out money in an effort to keep GM out of bankruptcy. The bondholders hold the greatest debt at $27.2B, the union is next with $20B, and the U.S. Treasury with $16.2B. The government imposed solution is for the bondholders to get 10% of the ownership from converting their note to equity. That's less than five cents on the dollar. The U.S. Treasury gets 50% of the stock and $8.1B in debt, as much as 87 cents per dollar, and the union gets 40% of the stock which covers one-half of their note and $10B more in cash over time. That's worth approximately 76 cents on the dollar. The government and the UAW will own 90% and manage GM. How's that for fairness? It looks like the private sector comes up short again when the government calls the shots and the lender with the largest claim gets short- changed in a rather disproportionate way. Tell me, do you think that GM will ever get private investment capital in the future? Would private money readily come to TARP banks that are now being run by Treasury? When politics start to control business decisions, profits become less important. Witness the stagnation of business growth in the Socialist countries of the world. When growth slows the only option a Socialist government has is higher taxes. I'm afraid the cat's out of the bag unless private interests go to the courts to block these two unfair and unjust bankruptcy charades. We better start standing up about this, because it's our money that's at stake. You can't keep making something from nothing." This is from a website:http://ezinearticles.com/?GM-Bankruptcy---Is-This-the-New-Unfairness-Doctrine?&id=2354963 that I thought offered the most compressed explanation of how GM could emerge from bankruptcy in 40 days....it just unloaded its debt and traded debt for taxpayer equity.

Was the topic you were writing or lecturing on (preparatory to your work on induction) causality? This is basically metaphysical with aspects of epistemology.

I recently read or re-read 'What has Government done to our money?' by Murray Rothbard in which I found out that Milton Friedman had predicted the price of gold would go to $6.00/oz (allegedly the intrinsic or industrial value of gold). I wish that Rothbard had replied that the intrinsic value of a paper dollar would be reached (nearly zero since it is made of a little bit of cotton and ink) before gold would reach $6.00. Note two things: the intrinsic value of a $100 bill is nearly identical to $1, and Milton Friedman said this right before the price of gold went through the roof. I also just read 'The Money Machine' a history of the Fed which was pretty good, but not as good as Benjamin Anderson's classic work. Does anybody here have a high recommendation for Rothbard's 'The Great Depression'?

I find the new look very attractive and more clear.

That ad of the Johnson campaign was interesting, and I had never really listened to the words until now: 'We must either love each other or die'....Floyd Ferris? I always thought of Johnson as the Cuffy Meigs type, so he must have been some type of hybrid. The issue however was real since Goldwater was hinting around that he would authorize a tactical strike of nukes in N. Vietnam.

I'm aware that Palin got a bad rap at the beginning of her campaign with McCain, and I have to admit I fell for the Library story at first. She started to grow on me as the campaign progressed, but I still have one big question: Why are Objectivist oriented people so willing to 'fudge' (Michael's word) on the $64,000 question, namely do the conservatives acknowledge rational self-interest as the guiding light of morality or do they believe in selflessness? This isn't a small 'fudge' it's a gigantic empire state building type fudge, because the way you answer this will influence everything else. If you can confront and dismiss the socialist ethic, your commitment to individual rights grows and grows: if you don't, your commitment to individual rights tends to diminish to zero. I may find Palin an appealing personality, but so is Obama; this isn't a personality contest it is a battle of ideas and Palin is on the other side (as is Obama).

You forgot to mention the 'green' legislation that is going to change the energy production of the U.S. for quite some time. Just think that if the next big thing is an ice age, what will happen if the oil and coal industries are virtually destroyed by this type of legislation.

Everyone going please give us a full report about the conference so that we may be there with you in spirit!

How could you confuse Ed McMahon with Farah Fawcett?

Michael, I've noticed a clear lack of civility many times in discussions over many topics. People on this web site are suppose to exemplify rationality, and sometimes you see it and sometimes you don't. Do you think that part of your job as the web site master is to make sure that the discussion is on point without ad hominem attacks?

1. Ted is correct in post # 12 that this is an expression of support, not money or troops sent in support so it is appropriate. Everyone else is wrong with the rest. 2. Notice that people are expressing the idea that if you aren't willing to attack you aren't willing to defend..as though the concept of neutrality wasn't capable of being grasped. 3. A non-interventionist policy (with a commitment to self-defense a la Switzerland) is the pure expression of Objectivist principles to foreign policy, including the idea of rational self-interest applied to foreign relations, the idea that the government creates consequences that are the exact opposite of their intended effect, collectivism vs. individualism, as well as the idea that 'war is the health of the state'. 4. The nuclear weapons that we are threatened with came from an interventionist policy, namely the Reagan administration allowed Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons as part of their cold war against the Soviet Union, and nuclear weapons technology went from Pakistan to Iran and N. Korea. The Reagan administration could have stopped nuclear weapons in a country that is 95% Muslim, and the Bush administration could have contained the Al Qaeda and the Taliban to Afghanistan and wiped out the problem but instead thought intervening in Iraq was a higher priority. Pushing the problem from Afghanistan to Pakistan was a disaster, and it shows what happen when you don't have a foreign policy, you just believe that if they have a turban on their head : 'fire!'.

You have to distinguish between Ayn Rand and Objectivism-Ayn Rand and Branden were of the opinion that homosexuality was a disease to be cured (see the first edition of 'The Psychology of Self-Esteem') but it is hard to see how Objectivism principles could prove that a sexual preference is superior to another. The benefits that gay people want may not necessarily be government benefits..they could be private insurance benefits for example.

I believe that science progresses from induction (All the swans I've ever seen are white) to a more deductive model with increased knowledge; for example a knowledge of the chromosomes and dna of swans might (some day) prove that all swans are either black or white, there isn't a chromosome for any other color let us say. The point is (whether this example is true of false) that you've gone from making an inductive case to a more detailed and deductive case, and the knowledge becomes more certain. This is the way Newton discovered his laws of gravity, watching apples falling induced him to think about gravity as a general case, and he came up with his law that the attraction of two masses is proportional to their distance. Of course for very high velocities you need Einstein, but that was also a deductive case. Science doesn't just look at a large number of x's and state that all x is y.

"The American colonists who rebelled against British rule did not find it necessary first to study the analytic-synthetic dichotomy." That would be pretty hard to do since Kant's 'Critique' wasn't published until 1781.

As far as Solzhenitsyn is concerned, I read his two most famous works years ago; 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' and 'The Gulag Archipeligo', and they were interesting. Spoiler warning: One day was fascinating because of the pointlessness of all of Ivan's work in one day, where basically the prisoners are building a prison to hold more prisoners, who work to build ...etc. The point is that these people would be productive and happier in society building something useful, the theme could be called 'What a waste'. The Gulag was frightening and depressing; what I recall most vividly is that Solzhenistsyn was sitting there in the room with the person who was deciding his sentence, choosing between 10 years and 20 years, and obviously enjoying toying with him. It should be mentioned that Ayn Rand didn't like his writing because of his religiosity, and the Gulag mentions her teacher (see Sciabarra for details).

No don't stop. It is nice and very encouraging to see someone doing something. (P.S. the word 'doing' was suppose to be italicized and underlined but apparently it doesn't work.

"I'm pretty sure that after 9/11 it will be too hard to have an American hero blowing up a housing project and I don't therefore expect to see a remake of the movie in my lifetime." Not to mention the Oklahoma City bombing.

It must be pointed out that there is a resident expert with links on this website who wrote the book on Self-Esteem. I'm wondering if Nathaniel Branden would allow such sweeping statements about self-esteem as declaring that Eastern cultures have less self-esteem as Western cultures (he has never stated that, I'm quite sure), or that lower self-esteem helps relationships. As a matter of fact he wrote a book on romantic love that states that a romantic love relationship is common among people of high self-esteem (In order to love someone else we first have to love ourselves).