shadesofgrey

This is so bizarre it's almost breathtaking. Ragnar is laughing, Rearden refuses to sell you anything at any price, and a quarry worker just raped your daughter. Galt is rewriting his radio speech, putting reasonableness and intrinsic value ahead of purpose and self-esteem. I'm sure the kids in the ghetto will be pleased to hear that they're getting free vouchers, but disappointed that their drunk, drug-addicted, ignorant, abusive mixed-race socialist parents have an Objectivist right to religion and are sending them to a maddras in Indonesia. As long as they refrain from falsely shouting "Fire!" in a theater and take care to provide cost of living adjustments for others, there's no limit to what these sweet little tykes can achieve in community organizing and government service. Not to mention there's no such thing as 'intrinsic value'... [see Tara Smith's Viable Values] Intrinsic in terms of the market value. Fundamentally, the value of all things is relative, yes, but using a car for instance, there is a basic market value that reflects the neighborhood price that most people will pay as agreement that the car is pretty much worth that price once you take manufacturing costs, labor, materials and all that into consideration. Hey, Wolfy....take a break. You don't have to be an idiot EVERY day. Did you even read the book? Rearden paid the most because he had the best workers. Ragnar never went after anyone who wasn't already stealing themselves. And Galt is about as REASONABLE a person as you can get. If your "response" resembled anything approaching a coherent point, I'd have more to say about it. But, since it doesn't, I don't.

Xray, Rand was wrong. There. Feel better? Michael Yeah I think that's pretty much a load of crap, too. Rand was human and had preferences like anyone else (a fact that I think tends to be forgotten). If she wanted to see women as in a complimentary role to men or dependent upon them or their relationship for meaning, then so be it; she's free to have that opinion. But that's ALL it is, an opinion. Would I say it's applicable to every woman out there? Absolutely not. To assume so would be the height of arrogance.

I don't think human inventiveness is a limited resource and even if I did I don't understand what this has to do with your example. I'm not a farmer, I'm a web developer. If I was a farmer I would definitely be an organic farmer etc. I would add that human inventiveness may not be a limited resource in theory, but the problem remains in getting the invention needed to the right place in time. If it takes 100 years for us to figure out a way to harness fusion or solar energy or some other "inexhaustable" resource, but we run out of our current holdings in 80, then that inventiveness didn't do us any good. (That was a very rough example, don't nitpick it - you get my point).

So who does decide what is rational, you? "Rational," in this context, means logically related to the requirements of man's existence and prosperity. You've never heard of a school treating all cultures as equal? You've never heard of a school running down the great industrialists by calling them "robber barons"? Must I go on? Darrell Welllll......I think there are certainly individual teachers that espouse ideas that your average objectivist would oppose; you hear about it every so often when a group of parents get up in arms about some idea their kids brought home. However, I think the idea that there is a concerted, organized, federally-sponsored effort to teach the virtues of socialism and all it entails in US schools is alarmist conspiracy propaganda. As for the multiculturalism, I would think that the idea is to impart the idea that all human life has value and that value is somehow expressed through a culture (itself being a variety of expressions of a people). I don't think every culture is equally valuable depending on your reference point. The idea of value itself is completely relative. So while teaching children that each culture has an empirically measurable value equal to all other cultures is erroneous, teaching them that all humans have the potential for greatness as expressed through various cultural media is a decent way to get kids to appreciate their neighbors. Regarding Robber Barons, I have no doubt that good men were caught up in the label and unjustly categorized, but there are plenty of examples of unscrupulous behavior by "great industrialists". Simply making money is not a measure of value or productivity in objectivism, you have to make it FAIRLY. You have to provide a quality product or service at a price that allows you to profit while not exceeding the intrinsic value of said product or service. You have to pay employees a wage commensurate with their value to the company, allow the possibility of wage increases, and provide cost of living and inflationary adjustments. Competitive suppression based on principles other than superior value are also immoral. Many so-called robber barons ran monopolies (at least temporarily) and a monopoly ALWAYS ends up producing an inferior product at an artificially elevated cost. Competition is the lifeblood of the capitalist system and without it the consumer becomes the victim. While many of these industrialists were also substatial philanthropists, that alone does not negate harmful business practices, as it amounts to stealing from Peter to pay Paul. It would be most accurate to teach that while these industrialists helped make the US the foremost economy of the 20th century, their gains (both personal and industrial) were not always achieved morally and that while we may aspire to their achievements, we cannot lose sight of our values on the way there.

I agree with the first part. "First-world" countries have markedly lower birthrates than developing countries probably for the same reasons that the poor and uneducated tend to have more children. Additionally, now, with the jobless rate being what it is, birthrates in the US have dropped measurably as people are more into "planning" family growth. Overpopulation doesn't really have to do with physical space though. Sure, if you get too many people together in an area that's too small, you have to deal with santation issues, disease, strife, environmental degredation, etc. Usually the term is applied in reference to resource allocation though. How much room it takes to SUPPORT an individual (to grow food, provide for recreation, etc.). Obviously these measurements vary per person and as such can only be a rough average estimate, but eventually there's going to be a number of people on the planet that exceeds our ability to produce food for them all. We currently have the production, but secondary to politics and logistical issues, it doesn't always get to where it needs to go. Hence there's plenty of hungry people around. Also, this uses the assumption that we're using our environmental resources in a way that is sustainable, which we're almost always NOT doing. At the moment, we have the luxury to do so because our stores of these resources aren't exhausted yet. We're not making any more coal or oil or natural gas or gold for all practical purposes. When it's gone, it's gone. Commodities like timber are obviously renewable, but we have not approached a level of renewal that matches our use. If we had, maybe 97% of the original forest in this country wouldn't be gone. In any case, in a perfect world our resources would have the right level of renewability and would be dispersed equally. They are not, so it muddles the actual "tipping point" at which there becomes too many people on the planet. Which would explain the current conflict over that number, with some people thinking up to 13 billion and some people thinking we already passed it.

I never ACTUALLY thought I'd see this on an objectivist forum. Compromise? The best of both worlds? A little reason inserted into the equation rather than an automatic, emotional, reactionary negating of the opposite side's view? That perhaps the answer to the environment vs. industrialization question is somewhere in the MIDDLE (a shade of grey if you will ;-) is refreshing to see on here. Right on. High fives all around.

I'm opposed to a federally-funded healthcare program chiefly because I work in healthcare and I know firsthand that the standard of care at private hospitals exceeds that of the VA (for instance) in general. If for no other reason than the amount of beauracracy is high within government institutions. That doesn't really have anything to do with my mammogram point though. That wasn't related to federal funding; it's private insurance that sets the cost of mammograms.

Thank you. I'm getting really tired of this reactionary crap from objectivists. They're supposed to know better. Unfortunately even some of the ones I know personally are prone to simply gainsaying some point because at first glance it's not in line with their beliefs. The whole concept of a rational series of statements intended to establish a proposition goes right out the window when they hear some trigger word like "Obama", "healthcare", or "socialism." Being a student of general human nature, I find it fascinating to see how people who profess to come to conclusions based only on rational thought actually arrive at those conclusions subconsciously through reactionary emotion. Hardly good representatives of the philosophy. Shades: Anymore than a priest who claims celibacy while he is molesting the choir boy, personal immorality and irrationality does not reflect on the philosophy, but on the individual. Are you finished with the strawmen, or do you have a whole roomful? Let's see, I am against medical research because Joseph Mengele experimented with real people. Hmmm Have you read much of Ayn? Adam Well, define much. What an individual thinks doesn't really matter to me, but when someone has immoral or irrational views under the guise of a philosophy that teaches the opposite, I have to take issue. For example, what that priest claimed in your example should, while being unpleasant to most people, be particularly offensive to Catholics.

The middle ground. I've been lucky not to find any grey hairs as of yet The non-E issue is what I was getting at. If we don't know what we don't know, I can't think of a good way to describe what we don't know.

Hm....interesting, I've never heard that about vitamin C before. The literature is pretty clear on megadoses of vitamin C being ineffective in preventing onset or duration of the common cold, but I haven't seen any randomized controlled trials regarding Hep C. I'll have to look into that. C. Diff. a horse of a different color, you're right. Unfortunately it usually arises from antibiotic use to cure a different infection, like pneumonia or pancreatitis. Usually Vancomycin is used to treat it, but that's a pretty harsh antibiotic and the prevailing census is that it won't work forever. There's already at least one bacteria (VRE) that's resistent to Vanc.

Interesting, I've never heard of that. Regular cats work with heat instead of electricity, which is why cold engines pollute more than hot ones. The precious metals in them do the catalyzing of exhaust gasses into what (in theory) should only be CO2 and H2O. It's not a perfect process, so you get CO, SO4, hydrocarbons and other stuff. On another note, Adam is right about spillover highway pollution. The amount of CO ingestion running next to a busy highway has been estimated to be equivalent to a half-pack of cigarettes over an hour. That doesn't take into account any other pollutatant or particulate. NYC has noticably worse air to me. If you're coming in from NJ or the air, on many days you can see the suspended smog above the island. I'm assuming the buildings play a role in trapping it.

I wouldn't think so. Even if you take it to the extreme in terms of sound, to the point where something is physically uncomfotable to hear, people could still choose to listen to it because they wanted to for some reason. There's plenty of photographs or art that's deeply disturbing, but people choose to look at it for one reason or another. They desire exposure to things that elicit a viscerally negative reaction. So in that sense, what may cause a physically negative reaction because of its ugliness may still be appealing for emotional reasons.

If art is representative of the artists "re-envisioning" of the world around him, paint splotches should be able to be art in that they can representatively convey meaning. If it's rich in symbolism, cannot those same paint splotches be used as symbols? Red representing anger or passion perhaps? I think it would be short-sighted to say that we've never looked at an abstract painting and gotten a "mood" out of it. A bunch of pointy black and red lines scrawled on a canvas conveys an entirely different mood than a group of pastel circles. Regardless of what YOU think of it, the artist may have been conveying anger over the death of a loved one in the former and a sense of peace and reconciliation after a divorce in the latter. The symbols used as splotches of paint may well be representative of real-world events. By relegating them to "decoration" you view them SUBJECTIVELY. Just because you may not understand an artist's reasoning for picking the medium and style that he did, doesn't mean that it was picked randomly. There may be a direct symbolic representation there of which you are simply not privy. The artist owes an explanation of his art to no one. Hence the usually subjective nature of art observation. It's perfectly understandable why she envisioned this school of art and why she liked the art that she did. However a fundamental question remains for me: Why is art "positive"? If you don't view man as essentially heroic (and unfortunately there's plenty of examples of that), than art as representative of the world around you or your value judgements may be dark, lugubrious, or unsettling. It seems naive to me to say that all men everywhere strive to become something greater. Many do not. Many strive to undermine the world around them, to pull others down in their self-hatred, to ruin that which others produce. This type of thinking, while morally questionable, is no less "valid" than idealistic Romantic thinking. It's the opposite side of the same coin.

I was wondering when someone was going to mention Wilkinson on here; he's like your quintissential objectivist sculptor. My dad introduced me to his work years ago and I've always liked the modern simplicity of the pieces. His website has a great cross-section of all of his works.

Well, the idea that rights are inherent in what it means to be human COMES from humans. Jefferson saying "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." pertains only to anyone who AGREES with the declaration. Unfortunately, you will have no trouble finding people today or at any point in the past who think that all men are most certainly NOT created equal. The English crown certainly didn't agree and their standard of living was as good as the Americans'. Ultimately it's an opinion, not a fact. It's an opinion that benefits most people and generally leads to a better quality of life all around, but an opinion nonetheless. In Burma or Somalia or Afghanistan the prevailing view is that there is a severe stratification when it comes to the value of human lives. You could easily make the argument that the quality of life in those places is inferior to that of the US, but they'll probably look at you and say "So what?" Just because it can be rationalized doesn't mean it can be effective. Being "right" is nice when you can pat yourself on the back, but it doesn't mean anything when you can't effect change. Equality in those settings doesn't mean anything when you all you know is INequality. If it did, then the ridiculous exercise known as "nation-building" would actually work.

My point exactly. Where exactly are these barricades and gun collection teams again?

Well put. Whether or not someone is an objectivist probably isn't going to influence their decision to donate to something like Operation Smile. 9 our of 10 people who do donate do so because they want to. The same goes for a lot of charities. In the end it doesn't matter anyway because the money is still going to a place it's needed and it's not getting there by force. You bring up a good argument with birth defects, but although you may see it as a big issue personally, it's just another in a myriad of issues of lifestyle like clean water, food, etc. As far as the bigger healthcare debate goes, healthcare itself is not a right. ACCESS to affordable healthcare is. This is because if you do not provide access, you effectively block someone from it as if by force. Poverty used a weapon instead of a consequence. Healthcare differs from a lot of other industries/products in that if you don't have access to Corn Flakes for instance, you're probably not going to die. The accessibility of healthcare is more important to physical well-being than the accessibility to a lot of other industries, so those people who assert that healthcare is simply another product or service are short-sighted and in my opinion, naieve. The issue is not black and white by any means. Cleft palate is not a fatal condition, but it has a significant quality of life impact and is relatively cheap to fix, making it one of the more efficient healthcare problems to solve. This still does not presuppose any sense of duty, but when considering asset allocation, factors such as relative ease of treatment need to be considered. The best example I can think of for this is insulin-dependent diabetes. Before bacterial recombinant DNA technology, diabetes had a 100% mortality rate. The first synthesized hormone in existence was insulin because it was determined that with the ability to do so, the most number of people had the most to gain if diabetes was treated first. It becomes a relative value judgement. Society weighs in with various cause support-groups (breast cancer, autism, alzheimer's, etc) and the medical establishment has its own recommendations. They usually meet somewhere in the middle.

I know two women whose breast cancers were detected early by mammogram and who were treated successfully. Other methods of examination did not reveal their condition, but the mammograms did. Until we get something more effective and accurate than mammography, it should be used by women to protect their lives and health. The results speak for themselves. Perhaps there are cases where mammography did not help but I see no harm to it other than the expenses incurred with false positives. What I found appalling was the recommendation that manual self examination no longer be taught. That is horrible. GovCo is out to get us. Ba'al Chatzaf The recommendation against manual self-examination (MSE) was based on using that as a primary screening method. Since it was determined that imaging and other studies were more sensitive and specific, the number of false positives produced by MSE resulted in its use being determined unnecessary. There's no recommendation AGAINST it per se, just a recommendation not to use it as a primary screening method. Regarding what you said about the expenses incurred with false positives on mammograms, that's pretty much the sole reason that the recommendations were changed recently. As with MSE, mammograms were found to have a sufficient amount of false positives to change the recommendation for the age at which women should get them regularly. The extra radiation exposure is negligable. There will always been women who find cancer early as a result of mammograms started at some particular age. If you lowered the age or recommended yearly mammograms to 18, you'd still find a couple women with breast cancer and their lives would be saved as a result of it. The issue is that these recommendations are made for an entire nation and the cost/benefit ratio is very much at the center of the argument. If cost were not an issue, you would have a point. However, it's a big issue. It's the only issue, actually, that led to the recommendations changing. It was found that the cost of mammograms and false positives when women start at age 40 was higher than the cost in terms of treated cancers. Like I said, no matter how low you go on the age scale, there will ALWAYS be people with cancer that you detect with a mammogram. In order to justify the treatment cost, the age of recommended YEARLY mammograms was adjusted upwards because women younger than that simply didn't have a high enough cancer occurence to validate the tests for EVERY woman. This would bypass the two women you know, yes, and the loved ones of every person lost to breast cancer would have a perfectly valid argument for lowering the recommended age, but the fact of the matter is that when you extrapolate the data out to include every woman in America, the cost is not supported by the benefit. It's a simple matter of economics, not some liberal national conspiracy (if anything liberals would want MORE mammograms done). If you really want to blame someone, blame insurance companies because their existence is why cost is an issue and these recommendations are made in the first place.

Thank you. I'm getting really tired of this reactionary crap from objectivists. They're supposed to know better. Unfortunately even some of the ones I know personally are prone to simply gainsaying some point because at first glance it's not in line with their beliefs. The whole concept of a rational series of statements intended to establish a proposition goes right out the window when they hear some trigger word like "Obama", "healthcare", or "socialism." Being a student of general human nature, I find it fascinating to see how people who profess to come to conclusions based only on rational thought actually arrive at those conclusions subconsciously through reactionary emotion. Hardly good representatives of the philosophy.

I was going to say something similar to this. The science of QM didn't exist for all practical purposes when Rand was alive and she certainly wasn't a physicist. At the end of the day, RCR is right in that no matter how much QM may differ from the classical model, WE as humans are the same as we've always been. We've simply discovered more about the universe and the sub-atomic world since Rand's time. She had no knowledge of QM and neither did anyone else at the time, but the principles that she applied to the human condition can still be applied whether or not objectivism supports QM. I don't think it does, by the way. The experimental discoveries in QM over the years have flown in the face of classical physics the same way the Coperican universe overturned the Ptolemic universe and how general relativity turned some Newtonian physics on its head. Objectivism doesn't explain EVERYTHING, it explains what Rand observed and she never observed anything at the subatomic level. If it did, no one would be looking for the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything and last time I checked, they still are. Simply SAYING "existence exists" doesn't make it so, it's supported by empirical evidence in most cases. That evidence is based on the phyiscal laws of the classical model of physics because that was the limit of human knowledge when she coined the phrase. When those laws no longer apply, when causality breaks down, as in some instances in QM, then necessarily the premise "existence exists" may not always be true.

I'm curious to hear responses to the theory that not only matter and space, but time itself began with the big bang. I find myself frequently asking: "Well what was there before that?" since it's counterintuitive that something came from nothing. Unfortunately our standard model has no answer for this quandry. Seeing as we as humans define "existence" by what we can empirically measure, and at some point in the past there may have been a "time" when there was no measureable matter or space or time, then by our limited definition existence didn't always exist.

If I told you once I told you a million times - don't exaggerate! Unfortunately it's easy to chalk up the deadliness of the last superbug to generally poor hygeine and sanitary conditions, over-crowding, and a lack of any effective anti-viral treatment. Today most of those issues are no longer a problem in the US. That said, the virus as an organism has thus far overcome every single one of our efforts to eradicate it and has proven to be the most adaptable of organisms. Vaccines are the only treatment that offers any real promise of ridding the world of a particular virus, and that takes decades of treatment. Vaccines only compliment the body's intrinsic defenses, they're not really a purely human weapon like, say, bleach if you want to sanitize something. As such, there has never been and is not today a single cure for any virus anywhere. Our treatments focus on supportive care, which has gotten much better in the last century. That said, a sufficiently virulent virus could overwhelm our supportive care abilities and there wouldn't be a single thing we could do about it. About 4,000 have died of the H1N1 flu this year, which is comparatively small. There already are superbugs in strains of ebola, hanta, and some EBV, but we've been fortunate that their geographic distribution is very remote. My point is that just because we haven't seen a superbug in 90 years doesn't mean we WON'T. Just because the possibility may be small, said possibility still EXISTS that at any time some virus could mutate into something that we can't control. Now I'm not going to plasticize and duct tape my house and you'd be safe betting on the idea that you're not going to die from a superbug, but it would be prudent to at least acknowledge the possibility.

You may enjoy A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. One of the better books I've read. It covers biology, astronomy, quantum mechanics all in a very entertaining, easy-to-read, but very thorough format.

Good point. Catalytic converters are virtually unknown outside of the US because of performance issues in Europe (they don't want to sacrifice power) and in developing countries it's as you said...people just don't care about air quality. There's also a higher proportion of deisel engines in other countries than in the US and though a well-tuned deisel doesn't pollute that much more than a gas engine, most of them aren't well-tuned. That said, cats are on the expensive side. Even for a cheap car in the US you're looking at at least $300 for a new cat and it only goes up from there. The catalysts inside are most commonly platinum and rhodium and they're becoming increasingly rare and expensive.

Thanks for the welcome. I work in healthcare, but I guess you could always call me a student. My friend is an objectivist, so I learned about it through her. Well, back in the day when were stone-age, our ability to modify the environment to suit our needs was far weaker than it is today. As such, we were at the mercy of natural phenomena like disease, drought, and pestilence that could seriously impact our survivability. These are the checks and balances I was talking about that are still in place for pretty much every other species. Now, since we have vaccines and irrigation and pesticides and all the other technological advances that we do, those checks and balances are no longer as influential upon our survivability. Our biggest threat becomes ourselves if not properly tempered. I'm not sure why you called that a red herring.