SteveWolfer

Trump wiped out any pledge - it no longer exists - Cruz broke nothing... except in the minds of people who want to violently strike out at anyone that won't join their love delusion, chant 'Trump' 'Trump' 'Trump' 'Trump', and attack anyone who is not of the Borg. Pledges are meaningless. There are other videos showing Trump making his 'pledge' conditional - adding conditions after it is signed (If I'm treated fairly") There is something Hilarious about Trump expecting consistency out of someone else. I have seen people gathered together in small tight groups - having a bible reading - safely sharing in warm delusions and fierce denunciations. I see the same kind and range of emotions from Trumpers. I was just going to ignore all of this, but then I saw that top left corner of this and every OL page. That photo of Ayn Rand, and the words "The Art of Living Consciously" and Objective Living. It kind of touch me. And all I can think is that we should be better.

That's the question. We'll see.

If he were to be elected, and if he did honor that promise, it would make nearly anything else he did worth it. And he is the one candidate that can bust political correctness wide open like a rotten melon. Those are very good things. But all of this has that ugly odor of false hopes. We don't know what his deepest desire is. Maybe he sees a way to use the presidency to turn his billions into a trillion. Politically, he is a different kind of animal. The usual measuring sticks aren't going to tell us much.

Yes, that's exactly the condition. But I have no reason to believe he'd honor it if he saw a better deal to made by changing those conditions. (And he did say "probably" pick from the list). He is a pragmatist and plays hardball and litigates about as often as other people change their socks and changes what he says from time to time - none of that is encouraging.

I don't expect there to be a Republican party for that much longer. It has become the divided, makes no sense, populist party with strange hangers-on that are neo-cons, evangelicals, establishment cronies, nut cases, and shows almost zero political principles. Trump is a con man. Sorry, but I can't see that any other way. I will vote for him over Hillary, but only if on the day before the election I believe that he will actually select Supreme Court nominees from that list. If I don't believe him, I'll throw my vote away on Gary Johnson. Mr. Art of the Deal might decide to let the democrats have a liberal for the court, but only if they'll promise to give him something he wants more. Is there any Trump supporter who can point to evidence of any kind that that isn't a reasonable fear? I've never seen such a lack of civility or principle or commonsense - and I'm not talking about the way Hillary Clinton is being addressed - she deserves it. I'm talking about how anyone who doesn't spout unconditional love for The Donald becomes some kind of piece of shit. We are witnessing the rise of a new embodiment of Political Correctness in the world of Trump. I can't tell you how disappointing that is as an excuse for discourse from some one I've respected in the past.

Michael, I have to say, Cruz was in a unique position. When you think of where Reagan was in 1976 it was similar, except that Gerald Ford wasn't someone that Reagan totally disagreed with on political principle, wasn't someone that he considered to be amoral, wasn't someone who had insulted his wife and accused his father of playing a part in the Kennedy assassination, and called him a liar again and again. Cruz hasn't changed his personal ambitions. He wants to be president. Nothing wrong with that. Trump supporters are upset that Cruz might run in 2020 EVEN if Trump is president and wants another term. I say that he would be a better president knowing that he will be accountable to Cruz people at the end of the first four years. There is no way Cruz could give a warm, loving endorsement of Trump. My guess is that Cruz does not believe that his pledge requires hugs, kisses or accolades. It requires that he not run against Trump as an independent or third party candidate. It requires that he not campaign against him. He said nothing against Trump. I think he is meeting the minimum standards.

I've only read the first half of the book, which documents the level of political problems we have in key areas (electing, legislating, the judiciary, the constitution, administration and the regulatory state). His examination of these is worth the price of book. The second half of the book is about recommendations and I just haven't gotten to it yet. In my book on Progressivism, his book is the only one I quoted.

What is frightening is that, as best as I understand this kind of thing, is that towards the end, the rate of decline increases at an exponential rate. I remember Rand writing somewhere that as long as men were still free to speak and write what they believe it was too soon to consider revolt. That makes sense. As long a people are able to write and speak their minds, and as long as they are free to assemble, and as long as the elections are not rigged, then there is a chance to make things right. With a badly educated, propaganda soaked, low information voter liberty may be lost anyway, but there is still a chance. When the government shuts down freedom of speech, censors what can be written, starts to ban this or that organization, or rigs the elections, then there is no longer a peaceful path. We are seeing the beginnings of the crushing of free speech popping up in the news. (Which agency was it that asked the Justice department to go after any corporation that could be branded a 'climate change denier'?) I don't know how much I trust the election results when it is really close. We saw the IRS go after conservative organizations and we've heard the FCC make noises about Fox News. The needed pathways haven't been closed yet, but the time looks like it is coming closer. And I'd expect a very rapid acceleration in the loss of rights afterwards. Charles Murray's book "By the People" has a stunning section of the modern regulatory state. The statistics are chilling. He describes the power of each agency to craft its own rules, to send out inspectors who get to decide when a business or citizen is in violation, they can carry out inspections without warrants, they do the equivalent of an indictment without judicial intervention or oversight, and fines or orders are imposed. If the person isn't happy, they can go to 'court' - the agency supplied and staffed court that is no part of our judicial system. If they lose, they can appeal - to the agency appeals court. If they lose that they can appeal it to the proper judicial system, but because of Supreme Court decisions, the agency is given a presumption of correctness. And to appeal it that far is extremely costly. This short paragraph doesn't begin to do justice to that section of his book.

I agree with that. I'd add that he wanted not just a Christian slant, but a Catholic slant... not strong, overt, or explicit... but always there. They don't turn a light on the inner workings so we don't know why they discontinued Beck and Napolitano's shows. Maybe ratings? And we have been kept in the dark about the progressive apparatuses attacks on advertisers. And we have to look elsewhere to find out what, if any, ideological change will come with Ailes leaving. I'd say that he is a complex man (artist, entertainer, marketer, business man... and who is also ideological).

You are putting words in my mouth. I said nothing about when libertarians first came on the scene. I didn't say that they had no ideas of their own. My respect for Ayn Rand is such that if you want to refer to her as "pissy and self-important" you can find someone else to discuss these issues with. When I said she had good reason, I was referring to my own opinion of the many strange varieties of libertarians. What does that, or any of your remarks about Objectivists have to do with the thread or with my post? I have no idea why you have gotten so nasty over my post - it seems like you went far beyond just disagreeing with my short post. I am a libertarian. (And an Objectivist.) I've been voting Libertarian since they first put up a candidate (John Hospers in 1972). Frankly, your comments about me "posing" and your mention of George H. Smith (Who I have considerable respect for, despite any disagreements we might have) is just plain strange.

This will most likely go to the Supreme Court. If Hillary wins the election, her appointment is likely to be far enough to the left to encourage a majority decision that boldly declares that the second amendment really doesn't mean that private citizens get to actually own guns. --------------- Q. If a person is a terrorist, or just wants to engage in a mass shooting, will these new regulations apply to them? A. Yes. They should understand that if they don't register properly they won't be within the law even before they begin shooting.

"Choice" could be defined as the outcome of a mental action: My 'choice' was to post a reply. "Choice" could also be defined as a kind of thought, but that does not make it a physical process. If I say, "I was so busy choosing which words to use that I didn't hear the doorbell," that sentence has to do with my focus and for someone to refuse to see anything there but movement of ions is to make themselves blind to a reality. You can NOT grasp the meaning from my passage of ions in nerve fibers. Yet you understand what I mean. If thought is mediated by the passage of ions through a nerve fiber that doesn't mean it IS the passage of the ions. In some cultures, men were expected, as a sign of respect, to hold the door open for a woman. That does not make "respect" a physical process. We don't just layer meaning on physical acts, we understand physical acts only through meaning. And those who would say that the physical act is the meaning or that there is no such thing as meaning, are just being blind. When you write about "the real cosmos" you are working with ideas that might or might not reflect what actually exists - that is because there is such a thing as meaning. Meaning is conveyed in language, for those who attempt to find it in the words and sentences sent to them. This is all much more than just physics. Hard determinism is foolish for choosing to use meaning to explain why there is no neither meaning nor choice.

Ayn Rand did NOT like libertarians. And there were good reasons. They took some of the political principles that Objectivists hold, but because they didn't always integrate them with more basic principles they were too liable to drift off in some strange direction. I'm sure that there are, somewhere out there, libertarian-communists. What we have with BIG is someone who has an idea, and instead of thinking about the underlying principles - which would have resulted in rejecting the idea, he falls in love with the novelty of the idea and that it is his. There are different ways of not taking ideas seriously... that is one of them.

Baal, that totally ignores the question I asked and the issue at hand. Plagiarism is different from using what we have learned from others - words have meanings. This is what I wrote, and that you ignored: "Can you honestly say that you are unable, or unwilling to see any difference between someone knowing, for example, what the Declaration of Independence says, versus using copy-paste and taking a significant part of it and saying they wrote it?"

Then I somehow misunderstood your comment about the world trade center. Doesn't it read the way a conspiracy would be implied?

I have the sense of Breitbart news having become a bit too much tabloid since his death. I'll wait and see what develops. Fox News has been too isolated from competition for their ideological niche. I would like to see more of a libertarian slant to the line-up. They used to be a bit more like that. I remember seeing Yaron Brooks as a guest now and then. Maybe a break up would be good... or not. The progressives must be drooling into their cocktails.

NIOF has to be seen as a derivative of individual rights... and they are moral principles. To be effective in the prevention of initiated force, moral principles, need to be fully accepted by all - and that isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future - so we need to cast those principles as law and enforce them. In that context, a pacifist or dishonest politician could point a finger and talk about a murderer being bad, but if it isn't cast as a law, then enforced, it isn't much of a sanction. Way better than no sanction, but sanction can't exist alone as the means of stopping evil. I think we have to have a boundary where what is in our mind, is ours, and someone yelling at us, or being extremely aggressive in their argument is still, however unpleasant, them staying on their side of the boundary. There are other cultures where they are far more forceful and aggressive in their arguments than we are here in the US - what happens is the children learn to be far stronger in resisting psychological aggressiveness. I've also seen cultures where they are tripped up by considering psychological aggressiveness that we'd see as normal as wrong - and it hamstrings them. Political correctness is an attempt to institute thought and speech control by making selected forms of "psychological aggression" unacceptable. Only if someone threatens the initiation of physical force has my will become impossible to follow. No matter how bad it gets, as long they don't use physical force, I can just walk away. Besides, if you don't keep the concept of 'force' separate from anything that is psychological you no longer have a definition of force - psychological aggressiveness is too subjective and anything goes.

Wolf, are you disposed to conspiracy theories where all the people working in the World Trade Center should have been in on the theories? Honestly, don't you think that is stretching things?

I'm not sure I follow you on that. My understanding is that sacrifice is a moral claim. It has the form of an individual exchanging a greater value for a lesser value, or for nothing. But the form has to be held as a moral duty - that the sacrifice, because it is a sacrifice, is a moral act. That we are morally required to engage in sacrifice. A person can choose to engage in sacrifice all on his own. Or a person can end up as the sacrificial victim, perhaps with government initiating the act. If one person refuses to sanction a sacrifice, they are, as much as possible, refusing to play the part of the victim. And if this becomes the moral and political stance of enough people, THAT would take the oxygen away that this evil needs. And there are times where one individual can refuse to go along with a requested sacrifice - like being brow-beaten into some kind of voluntary community service, and by refusing to sanction that call for sacrifice he will have taken away much of its power (all of its power over him). But notice that in both cases, the refusal of a lot of citizens to go along with a government scheme, and the refusal of the individual and the call for him to serve others, both achieve success by an intermediary. The mechanism of a majority vote, or by electing agreeable representatives, or intimidating the politicians. The withdrawing of the victims sanction did not automatically stop the sacrifice - there had to be an intervening political act. And the individual would succeed due to an intervening psychology or social convention or intimidation. When victims do not grant a sanction they do grow stronger and those would like to take advantage of them will find it harder, but it isn't a magic bullet that stops evil. That was the point I wanted to make. I see the word 'evil' as a descriptor of kinds of acts and of people who persist in evil acts. Never mystical. There might be evasion, or there may be deception, and to be evil there is always choice and never is it the product of 'circumstances' I don't know what you mean by me not granting my sanction to a mugging... I was saying I would never condone or explain away an evil act like a mugging.

That was just an example. I could change the example till it was ludicrous to lay blame on the victim. Were the cops in Dallas at fault? Those who were shot from ambush, from up high? Were the people in the World Trade Center on 9/11 failing in situational awareness, or giving sanction? I don't think so. I was trying to say two things: That in specific cases, it might no make any sense to say that the evil act was impotent - not in the sense of being able to cause harm. The second thing I was trying to say was that there are evil acts that can occur without a sanction by the victim of the act.

Come on, Baal.... are you keeping a straight face while you mix plagiarism in with all of the knowledge we got from somewhere else? Can you honestly say that you are unable, or unwilling to see any difference between someone knowing, for example, what the Declaration of Independence says, versus using copy-paste and taking a significant part of it and saying they wrote it?

I thought about that too. Discarded it as a bit too Machiavellian - too convoluted. And they want their key talking points to be the focus of the news cycle. They made lots of very bold statements that would occupy the news cycle without the Melania thing which was negative. You only want to steal a news cycle at the expense of negative coverage if you don't think you will fill it was stuff you like. Then I thought about it being someone sabotaging Melania - a Hillary supporter on the speech team. And I discarded that as well. It was much easier to imagine it as an accident of leaving in a copy-paste from Hillary's speech that they were going to change into different language and forgot. Or maybe Melania had helped a bit with the speech. And she found those paragraphs in the speech writers notes, but the weren't identified, and Melania liked them and put them in and then went out and gave the speech.

I still don't see the Rickroll thing, despite your poetic allusions. And I don't think you're evil, just fond of drama in an otherwise too banal world. I think that politicians engaging in plagiarism is disgusting, but I agree that Melania is an innocent victim in this (whether it was an honest accident, a case of incompetence, or a malicious prank).

I'm trying to explain my understanding of how Rand was referring to evil as impotent. If I understand her correctly, it isn't a case of "impotent for how long" because she is saying that evil cannot create or produce - ever. She seems to be talking about evil as a generalization of all evil - a kind of summation of its nature.... quite apart from a given concrete evil act, or specific evil person. I'm not doing well with my explanation. Try this... What is common to all evil (acts or people) - what are the properties to be found in all such acts or people? I think that is where Rand is dwelling intellectually when she is talking about evil being impotent. It may be a kind of obscure metaphysical approach that doesn't seem to have much import, but taken in and internalized it seems to have a powerful effect on ones psychology and sense of life. Getting away from evil would always be more specific and more concrete. One would try to leave a bad neighborhood, or find a better job, or leave a destructive relationship. That's because we are talking about an evil that is located in the neighborhood, or job, or spouse. But when you are talking about what is the nature of evil, that's different. The nature of evil is that it can't produce and that a person can't become evil without so choosing (i.e., choosing to blank out the fact that they are making a lot of bad choices) I can't fully reconcile the impotency of evil with the sanction of the victim in this sense. If a mugger comes up behind me, hits me over the head, and takes my money and it happens in a good neighborhood and there is no way I could have predicted this, then I gave no sanction ahead of time. And I assure you I would not sanction afterwards either. And the evil act was impotent to produce or to support the flourishing of man... but it was not impotent to crack me on the head and take my money. So, I think that's an area that needs more examination. I'm not clear on where NIOF fits (or doesn't fit) in this attempt to reconcile things.

Who said it was? There are consequences other than legal. I don't know about you, but I want to see character in political leaders. Those that use what others have written as if it is their own may not have character. Not true. To become a trite, hackneyed cliché something has to become common usage (like "much ado about nothing," or "drop in the bucket") and then it is no longer an act of plagiarism. It is different when someone copies whole paragraphs. You are right, this is a minor thing, for a number of reasons, but it is interesting.