kiaer.ts
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Posts posted by kiaer.ts
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This is a very naive Hollywood movie view of Indians...
It's not worth doing a whole rebuttal to this. Here's the first thing that popped up on a Google search--with oodles of more results like it:
Native American Clashes with European Settlers
West Virginia Division of Culture and History
Here's a quote from that article:
Native American Concept of LandA major factor in the treaty disputes was Native Americans' concept of land. Indians fought among themselves over hunting rights to the territory but the Native American idea of "right" to the land was very different from the legalistic and individual nature of European ownership. John Alexander Williams describes this in his book, West Virginia: A History for Beginners:
"The Indians had no concept of "private property," as applied to the land. Only among the Delawares was it customary for families, during certain times of the year, to be assigned specific hunting territories. Apparently this was an unusual practice, not found among other Indians. Certainly, the idea of an individual having exclusive use of a particular piece of land was completely strange to Native Americans.
The Indians practiced communal land ownership. That is, the entire community owned the land upon which it lived. . . ."
Such naivety! Such Hollywood crap!
Let's talk about horses or something and try to show off...
Michael
You said "nomads" and that is a word with a very specific meaning. It's also a very widespread notion that's a common stereotype, and a wrong one except in limited romantically portrayed cases.
Indians farmed, which certainly requires a concept of who owns the land and the crops. Your talk of nomads and comparison with the garden of eden calls forth images of Mongols on Horseback and people roaming the forest, not settled people with recorded treaties and national confederations.
Of course Indians didn't have the modern western concept of title in land expressed in deeds. I have made that point several times. Your source (a beginner's history of West Virginia) doesn't address farming - it addresses only hunting rights - which is ironic, since many settlers in North America were refugees from the enclosure policies of Britain, where land which had been long used for communal hunting and grazing was seized by nobles counter to ancient traditions.
As for your "show off" retort, it's just defensiveness. Knowing and communicating things is not showing off. I have spent years studying the cultures and languages of Siberia and the Americas. And you are a musician. If you were to educate me regarding music I would not accuse you of showing off.
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First step, shoot Martin Radwin.
Either the settlers come from the same society, in which case there is an established method for them to settle the land claim, or they are foreigners to each other, or savages, and just don't realize that they are at war yet. Maybe someday they will negotiate a peace settlement.
This is really not all that difficult, unless you arbitrarily ignore precedent and history and assume an evil God created from scratch for his entertainment. Anyone who has read Tunnel in the Sky knows you do not go on a camping trip without Robert's Rules of Order, and a loaded gun.
But if morality includes the fundamental concept of non initiation of force, then isn't a morality that doesn't apply in this situation incomplete or fundamentally flawed? Doesn't morality come from a deeper place than "established method" ?
Bob
As I said in a later post, there are all sorts of different concepts with different meanings and presuppositions. The contemporary concept of title to real estate is the result of a very long process of cultural, intellectual, and historical evolution. The way things are now didn't just happen overnight or follow ipso facto from moral concepts. Had collective farming or the hunter-gatherer lifestyle proven superior, we would not have individually owned plots of land. (We ourselves wouldn't even have been born.) The same with how ownership is demonstrated. Title to land can and has been established in many different ways both throughout time and in different geographical areas. Land title in the US is defined according to common law principles informed by legislation passed by the states and federal government. That would be different had various wars in the past gone differently - and the difference would be historical, not moral.
Selene's farmers might use the word "own" the valley, but if they do so it is because the concept of land ownership is already something known to them from their prior history. This sort of contexual/historical selective blindness affects a lot of debates, from this to the "gay marriage" debate and beyond. Had Selene's farmers simply been created from scratch, the concept of land ownership would never have occurred to them, they would simply have used what they used and travelled where they wished to travel. Or, if one family had come from a culture where only fenced in land could be owned, they would reject a claim by the other family to own land which had been surveyed with, say, boundary stones having been placed to define the property. What in nature would make one sort of claim more valid than the other?
Legal concepts develop over time through use and success. They did not spring into being based on someone's positing A=A with all else following. We validate (show the reasonableness of) such concepts using moral philosophy. But philosophy doesn't create the law or the state from scratch. The state and the law are entities we inherit whose origins lie in the struggles of real men throughout history, not in the validating arguments of Ayn Rand.
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Thanks, I learned two interesting things reading that piece.
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My dad insists Shrew is Taylor's best movie, but I have never been able to get more than 10 minutes into it.
As for Romeo & Juliet, we watched the Zeferelli version repeatedly in high school. But I never enjoyed it until I watched the 1996 version with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio.
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Joel,
As I understand the Indian mentality back during pioneer settlements, they had no concept of private property like the white man did. In the things I have read, they were not all peaceful, either. Just like with cultures all over the world throughout all of human history, they made war on each other. Some practiced slavery, too.
So they were not innocent victims leading peaceful lives in the Garden of Eden until the evil white folks came along and destroyed their paradise. They were no better and no worse than other nomadic civilizations.
This is a very naive Hollywood movie view of Indians. The nomadic lifestyle requires horses, which did not exist in the Americas until they were introduced by the Europeans. Only some of the Sioux and the Apache in the Great Plains took up a horseback raiding lifestyle, and they were both descended from maize farming cultures. Settled farming societies were the rule throughout most of the Americas, with hunter-gatherer societies with established fishing rights among the Algonquins of the Canadian north and highly advanced salmon fisheries in the North West. Acorn groves in California were tended with great care. The Tlingit were so wealthy and Advanced that they were never conquered by Europeans.
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In the Q and A period, Wendy asked Gotthelf, in no uncertain terms, if he truly believed she was immoral if she engaged in sex with people she did not fully love or admire. As I recall, Wendy clearly implied that she did not agree with Objectivism's quasi-puritanical perspective on sex. Gotthelf admonished her, telling Wendy that she had to engage in evasion in order to do that. He clearly implied she was immoral in some way, in front of an audience of about fifty people. I always considered him an a-hole for that crap.
So am I safe to infer from this post that this forum is not, by and large, in agreement with "Objectivism's quasi-puritanical perspective on sex"? I would be relieved to find objective thinkers who disagree with that.
Hi Carrie,
Considering the wide variety of posters here, no doubt there are some who would call themselves "purists" with respect to the "d'Anconian" view of "moral" sexual intercourse as requiring love between two people with mutually compatible values.
Francisco: "Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love."
I would be pretty damned depraved if that was the rational, objective standard.
Even so, you might find a few OL members taking that orthodox perspective on sex. A wide diversity of viewpoints can be found here. My own view—and I am guessing it is shared by a lot of OL members-is that the psychology of human sexuality is far too complex for us to be throwing around terms like depravity at the present stage of knowledge. As for myself—like many if not most men—I tend to respond very strongly to women on the purely visual level prior to any awareness of the person's values. Of course, outside the pay-as-you-go plan for romance, there is typically a conversation or two which precedes any physical interaction. Introductory conversations can definitely kill my desire in certain instances, but not often. On the other hand, from my current perspective, I also find I am drastically more selective now than I was in my youth. And a strong value affinity can raise the emotional component of the sexual experience to amazing levels of intensity.
Creative? Sounds like a flame war. Wars are so boring. Real exploration of ideas is SO much more interesting. . .
There are a lot of OL members who apparently feel the opposite, I'm sorry to say. They just don't feel they can express themselves honestly unless they can rip you a new one. And they either make a mockery of politeness and/or engage in endless discussions about the meaning of civility as if respect were a strait jacket that unfairly restricted their ability to communicate. Discussing ideas is just no fun at all for some unless they can top off their impressive arguments with a conclusion about what a stupid fool (idiot, moron, cretin, a-hole, imbecile, et. al.) you are for not agreeing with them. It's very sad.
I'm sure that's why so many of the people who visit OL decide against posting here. Who wants to take the time to put their thoughts in writing, only to have some nerdy know-it-all respond with a nasty personal attack? Even so, welcome. I hope you decide to stay.
Yes, to all points
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But when she turned full face, people experienced a small shock of disappointment. Her face was not beautiful. The eyes were the flaw: they were vaguely pale, neither quite gray nor brown, lifelessly empty of expression…
(description of Lillian Rearden in AS)
No. Sorry. Her eyes are all wrong.
A remembrance by Hollywood Reporter film critic Todd McCarthy recalled a meeting in the 1970s, when the actress had essentially retired from the big screen. "What should abruptly stop me in my tracks," he wrote, "but a pair of eyes unlike I've ever beheld, before or since; deep violet eyes of a sort withheld from ordinary mortals that were suddenly looking up into mine from mere inches away."
Yes, that was the problem with Gary Cooper as Roark, his not having orange hair.
Taylor would have made a good Dominique as well.
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Ted:
I understand your default position.
To shoot Martin Radwin?
However, since they were seeking a place to settle and raise a family, they have a sense of purpose and structure.I believe each of these families would presume that they own the land that they are using and possibly they might believe that they own as far as they can see.
If a person asks you whether it is right for a man hanging from a window ledge to kick out a window to save himself, the proper answer is, "How did he get there in the first place?"
Again, do they come from civilized societies with the concept of land ownership? Both Jews and Romans for instance, were big on (even religious about) marking out their territories with physical markers. Are they entirely ignorant of the existence of other people, to the point of not having any traditions on how to mark land ownership? Who sets off to colonize land without having worked this out ahead of time? Although, of course, we are a dying culture, losing contact with such essential concepts, historically, survey has been sufficient for states to make claims, and enclosure and improvement sufficient for individuals. Ownership is an inherently political concept.
There's also the question of the need to integrate new knowledge. There is a difference between saying, "This is our valley," (we discovered / settled it), and, "We own this Valley," (we have a deed which the constabulary of the fatherland will use for to protect). The idea of owning the land in any real sense is meaningless if there are no other claimants and no state behind you to defend your claim to it. Inhabit, claim, control, improve, defend, and hold title to are all separate concepts, each useful, and each reflecting a certain level of cognitive and cultural development. The last is what is meant by own land in our society. To use the word own without specifying all these circumstances and presuppositions, as if it had its own intrinsic meaning, is what has classically been called to equivocate, and what Rand would call to speak in floating abstractions.
Ownership presupposes a polity. If the settlers cannot form their own compact voluntarily, then the answer depends on which state wins the war.
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One of my favorite juvenile Heinlein stories with lots of adult themes.
"Tunnel in the Sky is a science fiction book written by Robert A. Heinlein and published in 1955 by Scribner's as one of the Heinlein juveniles. The story describes a group of students sent on a survival test to an uninhabited planet. The themes of the work include the difficulties of growing up and the nature of man as a social animal."
Tunnel in the Sky Heinlein Wiki
In this iteration of the Valley of the Property Dolls, they do not come from the same society, nor the same race, nor do they speak the same language.
Do they each own the property they are using?
"Own" is a political concept and you have specified that there is no polity. I.e., you have specified two troops of furless chimpanzees, intentionally without specifying their habits, eductaion, or disposition. The default state of man is war. Let me know the result of their encounter.
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First step, shoot Martin Radwin.
Either the settlers come from the same society, in which case there is an established method for them to settle the land claim, or they are foreigners to each other, or savages, and just don't realize that they are at war yet. Maybe someday they will negotiate a peace settlement.
This is really not all that difficult, unless you arbitrarily ignore precedent and history and assume an evil God created from scratch for his entertainment. Anyone who has read Tunnel in the Sky knows you do not go on a camping trip without Robert's Rules of Order, and a loaded gun.
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What an attack dog Mailer was! The type who enjoys making mincemeat of his opponent.
Who is the lady in the group?
Janet Flanner, not someone I'm familiar with. There's more context to this clip, and Vidal comes across as a jerk also.
Mailer and Vidal both jerks? Who knew?
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That wikipedia article section is a bunch of bullshit. Bull fighting traces to Mother Goddess worship. The Indo-Iranian Mithras cult's bull-blood sacrifice has nothing to do with bullfighting, just blood sacrifice. The head and horns of the bull represent the uterus and fallopian tubes in the ancient Goddess religion. This is depicted in pre-indo-european culture across the Mediterranean. See the Minoan culture of Crete. See the bullrunning in Pamplona, Basque Country. This has nothing to do with Rome or any patriarchal culture as such.
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Hi everyone, thanks for all of the welcoming. Haven't had much time to do internet stuff since the other day. I'm really just interested in discussing the various aspects of Objectivism and how the principles apply to current events and daily life. I'm aware that sounds vague, but at the moment there aren't any things within that sphere that I came here specifically to discuss. I currently attend Kean University (which no longer has a philosophy dept. as of last year by the way), majoring in econ and wanting to switch to philosophy, and hoping to transfer to Rutgers in a semester or two.
I originally discovered Ayn Rand's works in high school when I had to read Anthem for summer reading. That was my sophomore year I think and though I liked the book I didn't look into Ayn Rand more until I was a senior. At that point I had been getting into politics and I kept hearing Ayn Rand's name being thrown around now and then, so I went back and reread Anthem and then my teacher gave me The Fountainhead to read, and it just progressed from there. I haven't gotten to read many of the Brandens' works at this point, though I did read Nathaniel Branden's essays in Rand's nonfiction books.
Also, lol @ the Lollipop Guild thing.
Rutgers still has a philosophy department. I recommend classes with Brian McLaughlin. He's friendly, smart, and eminently reasonable. HE was my undergrad advisor in my Philosophy major. He was not at all hostile to Rand or Randian arguments. (He likes Daniel Dennett.) My other favorite philosophy professors are retired though.
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The horror, the horror . . .
Thanks, Ted.
But you are the only poster I have ever seen on Objectivist Living who, when confronted with the reality of the destruction of a country and the mass murder of its citizens, responds by telling cheap jokes, as though this were somehow something to laugh about. You are one sick, twisted sub-species of humanity.
Martin
It's like running smack into a wall, isn't it Martin? A wall of implacable, invincible stupidity.
The only joke here is you two and your baseless accusations and hysterical (i.e., insane, womanly) name calling and armchair zealotry.
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This guy has my sympathy. The prosecutor literally said he was a terrorist, even if he didn't use force. (!) But, unfortunately, they had a fair cop on his putting USA on them and so forth. A small fine and an injunction would have been appropriate. But of course they seized the assets.
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Talk about hoping the poster was drunk when he made that comment.
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It's a good thing that Phil is not involved in this thread because he would be in adhominemanaphylactic shock over this heavyweight intellectual argument.
Try saying that new word three times.
I hope you are posting drunk, because I would be sad to find out that someone as smart as you are would be petty enough to bring such crap here sober.
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The best Dick Cavett ever was an episode with Robin Williams.
I haven't seen that one, sounds good, it's not on YouTube far as I can tell. Here's a good one though:
The ending is the best.
I recorded the episode onto cassette tape off the television speaker, must have been about 1981. Never came across the tape again. Have been checking the internet for it regularly, but no luck.
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The best Dick Cavett ever was an episode with Robin Williams. The two improvised a dialog doing their impressions of Truman Capote talking to William F. Buckley. Dead on, the funniest thing I have ever heard.
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Folks:
By definition, Keating did not do everything in his power. He did not proceed into either the State Supreme Court or the Federal Court to obtain an injunction.
Adam
Rand absolved him by having him say there was no one to appeal to, that no one was in charge, and Roark agreed.
The Valley of the Property Dolls
in 3 - Ethics
Posted
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoA5cqDSasM