kiaer.ts
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Posts posted by kiaer.ts
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Thanks, Ted. I won't and I tend to agree.
It seems that the anarcho-capitalists poo-poohing my article have their arguments grounded in Kantian skepticism (i.e. no one can know anything about anything) and not Objectivist or even libertarian philosophy. Let alone reality itself.
Don't be surprised, Mike, at the response from the usual anarchist pacifist suspects. They are not Objectivists who see the purpose of government as the actual protection of our rights in the real world, but Objectionists, who adhere to an intrinsicist view of rights because, like Lutherans who believe in Justification by Faith Alone, it makes them feel morally superior. (Bob Bidinotto wrote a great essay on moral intrinsicism among libertarians, but I don't know that it is still available since his blog came down.) This is an ancient fallacy, the idea that what you "believe in" and not success in the real world is the essence of the good. Nietzsche explained the motivation for this by what he called Ressentiment.
Yes, that reminds me of hearing Ron Paul on the radio (Smerconish) the other day. He went on for some minutes about the evil motives of "America" in its need to gin up hate towards our enemies, and then segued smoothly into a complaint about how we don't take Qaddafi at his word. Paul referred to Qaddafi's claim that he was opening up the Libyan armories to provide a gun to all comers who want to defend Libya from the foreign invaders. Paul said, "That doesn't sound like the actions of a dictator to me."
Can you believe such crap? Anyone can see the propaganda value of his statement for his supporters and the western press, but who really believes Qaddafi is handing out guns to all comers? But according to Paul we can know with certainty the evil motives of Americans, but a terrorist and certified lunatic is to be given the benefit of the doubt.
Paul then complained that Obama hadn't sought congressional approval for the use of force, a criticism with which I agree even more strongly than Paul, perhaps. But when asked what Obama should do to rectify the situation, perhaps seek belated congressional approval, he said Obama should apologize for making a mistake (in invading, not for failing to seek authorization) and withdraw immediately. Our reputation is bad enough without such nonsense.
The Kantian skepticism charge is a good call, and I will add it to my list of standard criticisms of the pacifist-anarchists.
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Don't be surprised, Mike, at the response from the usual anarchist pacifist suspects. They are not Objectivists who see the purpose of government as the actual protection of our rights in the real world, but Objectionists, who adhere to an intrinsicist view of rights because, like Lutherans who believe in Justification by Faith Alone, it makes them feel morally superior. (Bob Bidinotto wrote a great essay on moral intrinsicism among libertarians, but I don't know that it is still available since his blog came down.) This is an ancient fallacy, the idea that what you "believe in" and not success in the real world is the essence of the good. Nietzsche explained the motivation for this by what he called Ressentiment.
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Why do I imagine that sounding like it was said by Burgess Meredith as the Penguin to Cesar Romero as the Joker?
Your abject stupidity is my guess.
JR
Wow, that ranks up there with the all-time best stupid comebacks: Doofenshmirtz, Frank Burns, and Dr Evil
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So why should anyone with any familiarity with Galt's character even contemplate that Galt would accept the position of political/economic/military dictator of the U.S., otherwise known as the presidency?
If duly elected and with a genuine "electoral mandate" to move towards laissez faire?
I think that's a fantasy. You can't beat the house when the house sets the odds; you will always end up losing. Politics is a rigged game. The rules of the games are set by the ruling class to insure that, no matter who is nominally elected to office, they will always win and we will always lose. We can't beat them by playing their game. Politics is a bottomless sewer draining the energy of anyone who participates in it.
If liberty is ever to be achieved, it will be achieved from the bottom up, not the top down, by a critical mass of people who have figured out how to ignore the state and to replace its functions with voluntary, market based institutions. I am not optimistic enough to expect that this will happen during my lifetime, but it will ultimately happen either this way or not at all. Getting an objectivist/libertarian god elected president of the United States in order to turn the US into a libertarian paradise is a prospect no more real than Santa Claus.
Martin
You speak the truth, Martin. Those who speak the truth aren't terribly popular around here (fantasies about checks and balances, the Republican Party, and Glenn Beck are far more widely acclaimed), but there are a few of us who do appreciate seeing it (the truth) on our screens. Bravo!
JR
Why do I imagine that sounding like it was said by Burgess Meredith as the Penguin to Cesar Romero as the Joker?
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I came across some zooplankton that looked similar to the horseshoe worm. Then I learned that many zooplankton are the larval stage of various marine creatures. At the time I hadn't recalled that someone already suggested that it was something in larval form. But anyways, I then searched larvae zooplankton and that was one of the first images that came up.
I provided links to the images in my other posts....
Here's the webpage and pic http://www.google.co...iw=1280&bih=626
Thanks. That's worth the six Atlas Points
, plus one for extra credit.The phoronids are a small phylum in the lophophorate superphylum, which includes bryozoans, and the superficially bivalve- like brachiopods. The lophophorates all have a ring of tentacles as part of their feeding mechanism. Higher animals are grouped into two great groups, the protostomes, and the deuterostomes, which differ in the developments of their guts and the internal arrangement of the nervous system. Vertebrates and Echinoderms (we and the starfish) are deuterostomes. Moluscs, and annelids form one great branch of the Protostomes, Arthropods and their allies another. The Lophophorates share some characteristic of each group, and most classify them as primitive protostomates close to the origin of the two higher lineages.
Here is the Wikipedia article where I first found the image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoronid
Here are images of all sorts of phoronids: http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&biw=1169&bih=684&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=phoronid&aq=f&aqi=g2g-msx1&aql=&oq=
Here are images of the living fossil brachiopods, which are like phoronids living inside what look like bivalve molusc shells: http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&biw=1169&bih=684&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=brachipod+living&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
Here are various lophophorates (note the name means "crest-bearer", hence the pheasant-like bird mixed in with the images): http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&biw=1169&bih=684&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=lophophore&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=
Here is a chart of the relations of the animals. The lophophorates are not depicted, but would be a lowest branch of the protostomes, between them and the deuterostomes.
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Actinotrocha larva of a phoronid worm a.k.a. horseshoe worm
Can you show your work?
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What I want to know is what's with that freaky little pair of "eyeballs"? Have the Martians invaded? YIKES!! If I remember my high school biology, microorganisms, one-celled life forms, protozoa, paramecia, amoebas and the like don't always have a central portion and even the ones with a nucleus would have only one dark 'spot', not a matched pair. The eyespot is a much later development, if I recall, and you don't get -two- of them until you have bilateral symmetry which arises with much bigger creatures like worms. Unless this a worm spawn or egg or larva... (Okay, I'm out. That exhausts any high school biology or Asimov science essays I half-remember at the moment.)
Well, that gets you four out of a six possible Atlas Points, Phil.
The remarks on symmetry and paired organs are all correct - except that I don't think the "eyespots" are eyes as such, but likely excretory organs. (I chose the image because they do look like eyes, of course.) And yes, it is a larva.
Any hints I can give will make it easy to find. What would you identify as this creature's obvious identifying features? Phyla are identified by broad characteristics, like backbones for vertebrates, a mantle (and usually foot and shell) for moluscs, and so forth. The phylum of this creature is very small in number of species.
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So why should anyone with any familiarity with Galt's character even contemplate that Galt would accept the position of political/economic/military dictator of the U.S., otherwise known as the presidency?
If duly elected and with a genuine "electoral mandate" to move towards laissez faire?
Did they have elected "public officials" in Galt's Gulch?
JR
Argh, no, it was a private estate. I believe that was covered in the book, or it may have been in one of the question periods after an AR lecture.
I was answering speculation about if John Galt were duly elected President of the US, would he take it? Being a fictional character, we can disagree endlessly about what he would or wouldn't do under limitless contextual variables. Sounds like a dull exercise.
Why do you keep pulling his finger?
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I can't identify the bugger to the left, but the purplies look like Trichomonas vaginalis or a close relative.
Ted, (I hope) You're (not) a sick man!
My own avatar is a free living invertebrate, not a disease organism, if that's what you mean. The purple meanie was in ND's post.
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Yes, Ood fetus is a good guess, Dennis. But it is too complex to be a single celled protozoan.
Protozoa can get pretty complex looking:
Obviously, yours looks like a mushroom with tentacles, maybe trying to offer a hug.
What's this thread supposed to be about?
That protozoa looks like a space shuttle, and the two purplies are adorable.
If this isn't research I don't know what is.
I can't identify the bugger to the left, but the purplies look like Trichomonas vaginalis or a close relative.
My creature is multicellular. While the single-celled protozoans may have flagella or cilia, which are cell organelles, my creature's tentacles are obviously not cilia, but extensions of the body wall. Likewise, the internal organs which are clearly visibly are obviously not cell organelles.
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Don't worry, Peter, it isn't.
Yes, Ood fetus is a good guess, Dennis. But it is too complex to be a single celled protozoan.
Here is a better picture:
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, you worm!
You're getting warm.
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Why did Jeffrey Dahmer never eat any clowns?
Ready...
because they taste funny.
Had he only eaten clowns, and I been a juror, he'd've been acquitted.
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No, it's not a hydra or a jellyfish or even a cuttlefish. (You are way off, Xray, I said "above" and not "to the left" - you'll see the cuttlefish if you scroll to the top of the page.) It is not a member of any of those classes.
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Kucinich vs O'Reilly Watch how O'Reilly looks like a deer in the headlights when Kucinich brings up the little matter of the Constitution.
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> POST THE DAMN LINK, PHIL!
You can find everything at the movie's official website: http://www.atlasshruggedpart1.com/
Thanks, Phil. I suppose that means ND was correct that they are the same links.
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After thinking about the morality of quoting a personal conversation, I decided to get rid of it. I tried once to contact Jimbo after Wikipedia became a success but could not get through to him. His remarks were well written so I did not think he would mind, but as Ted said, I did not get his permission.
All the other quotes from him were public. Ghs's comment about Jimbo's link to porn sites would be worse for his political aspirations than my quote.
Interestingly, no one picked up on an interesting point. Wikipedia is an anarchist "institution."
Thanks to Ghs for the clarification about Jimbo's thoughts about political anarchism.
I will leave the rest of my letter as is.
Peter Taylor
That's admirable.
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To create is to rearrange usefully.
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Oh, you meant that someone else should do the work.
That's negligent of you Michael, and your criticism is facile.
I supplied the link earlier. Geez. And now that Ted's switched from the Arrakis tabby cat avatar to that, well, whatever it is he's got now, I can no longer post a YouTube video of a cat fight by way of illustration.
Oh hell, I'll do it anyway.
Maybe it's the same link as the one you posted to all theaters, but not all theaters have tickets listed for sale as his quote implies. Him not having posted the link, how am I to know?
POST THE DAMN LINK, PHIL!
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Obama's family is the only thing I envy him for. Well, maybe his money. Okay. His youth, good looks, charm --those too. And his basketball skills. Then there is the elixir of all that power....
Good looks and charm? The man looks like Count Chocula, and he can't make sense without a queue card. And even then it's obvious he doesn't understand the emotional import of what he's saying.
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Are we supposed to be happy or sad that Wales is not an anarchist? I haven't quite figured that out yet. He is being treated like a kid that neither team wants on its side.
He's worse than an anarchist, he's a anarchist tolerationist. See Peter Schwartz's Libertarianism article for the process of "reasoning" needed to arrive at this conclusion.
LOL!
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Fair enough, Ted. I'll try to pull a little more out of you while on the subject.
Years ago I learned of abduction in my Philosophy of Biology class, a favorite. The philosopher Elliot Sober has an intriguing twist to the creationism debate. The design argument, traditionally understood as an argument from analogy, he says is better thought as an inference to the best explanation. In other words, at one time we knew of only one origin of things that looked designed: a designer. Darwin's theory, Sober argues, became the superior explanation because it could account for the appearance of life's design, as well as the sloppy parts of that design.
I think this is a clever argument, even commendably persuasive (it reflects the humility of pragmatism: "who cares for Certainty, it seems to me..."). But it implies creationism was intellectually credible right up until Darwin - despite its inherantly nonsensicality. While the argument is based on observation (designs have designers), testability was out of the question until a theory like evolution turned up. This appeal to abduction strikes me as grossly non-Objectivist. It is to say, despite our explanation's problems, it's the best we have. Is abduction inferior to other types of reasoning? Is abduction alone justification for regarding something as true?
Another question to add to the list above is if induction is the essence of concept formation, does abduction have a similar relation?
Btw, Ted, your posts attacking gene selection in other threads were great. I wouldn't have understood their gravity without the class I mentioned above. That one of science's most popular writers still champions this (last I heard) is bothersome.
Oh, crap. Once again I have spent a long time crafting a response only to have it disappear into never never land, unlike when posting on other fora or writing at wikpedia. I'll try again later. In the meantime, if you want to read something interesting, check out the first paragraph of chapter one, "Necker Cubes..." of Dawkin's book The Extended Phenotype.
Okay. I don't have a worked out theory of Induction per se. I accept the scientific method and Rand's theory of concept formation and find neither problematic. Things like the black swan fallacy are rather obvious skeptical sophistries. Were I to address the matter at book length I would think on it for a long time and possibly come up with various formally defined concepts.
Thinking on one foot, it's obvious that induction is the entire process of forming new concepts and conceptual generalizations, whether explicitly, as in science, or implicitly, as in the mind of a growing child. (This, by the way, is why Shayne gets it wrong when he complains that we don't need to understand how children think.) Abduction is just a step in this process, us explicitly formulating our vague notions in a way that can be tested, confirmed, strengthened, reformulated, and tested again. It's the step in which we make the chaos in our head into a testable hypothesis.
So far as that applies to creationism, there are two issues. The first is whether it is proper to observe the purposeful complexity of certain parts of the world and then to ask if one should seek for a cause of it. The answer is obviously yes. And I don't even have a problem if people at a certain level of intellectual development want to name that vague cause Providence, saying that whatever the cause may be, that is the name we will give it.
The second step in creationism is the arbitrary one. It's the step of going from a vague pre-scientific idea of Providence to the concrete claim that a certain grouchy bearded sky god did it. That's just arbitrary nonsense. It's a projection of subconscious notions of mommy and daddy onto the world, not an educated guess for which there is the slightest evidentiary starting point.
I think it is quite informative to observe the behavior of dominant male chimps during a thunder storm. They beat their chests, they howl, they grimace at the sky, they strut about, they shake the rain-filled trees violently.
The priesthood of the sky god priesthood unites man and chimp across a six-million year evolutionary divide.
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An actual link to this:
Currently booked theaters are listed here. Tickets are already on sale at these theaters.
would be helpful.
... OK do it and post it here.
Oh, you meant that someone else should do the work.
That's negligent of you Michael, and your criticism is facile. You deleted my internal quote around the phrase "Currently booked theaters are listed here. Tickets are already on sale at these theaters" from Phil's post. It is obvious that the email sent to Phil contained a hyperlink at the word here. How it is, exactly, that I am supposed to hack Phil's email account to provide you with the content of that link is beyond me, but I did spend some time vainly looking for the information. Try aiming your criticism where it belongs.
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I do not think he will mind if I use his offlist quote.
Do you know this? Did you ask? This is not the first time you have done this. Not only is it quite rude to reproduce people's private correspondence, doing so wholesale is a violation of copyright.
I'm with Ted on this one.
Can the reproduction of private email correspondence, if done in sufficient quantity, really constitute a violation of copyright law? This is not a rhetorical question. I honestly don't know, and I'm curious.
Ghs
Yes, it is a patent violation of copyright to reproduce correspondence such as letters and email (rather than just report the contents, perhaps using short excerpts) as well as internet posts at length. That fact might be of interest to the owners of this forum in regards to this and prior instances of Taylor's lengthy reproductions. See http://www.google.co...ight+private+co for leads.
Here for research
in Objectivist Living Room
Posted
You got your Atlas points earlier in the thread.
I was trying to avoid going into too much detail, Phil, but I believe the dark spots are the paired nephridia, basically kidneys. And some animals do indeed have paired nephridiopores.