mfgreaves

Michael,

I was as angry as you were when I first heard the news. "Murderers" was the word that (wrongly) came to my mind.

Calming down over several hours, and then following Lessig's twitter feed to Swartz, I found many confused and concerning ideas. It was only a matter of time till he got in trouble with the government.

Also it is wrong to suggest that the only property which he had no regard for was the JSTOR stuff. I can find no evidence of any regard for any property.

I also don't agree that he was a genius. RSS is important but simple, lots of people could have invented it at 14. Thousands.

It's still very sad to me.

It's incredibly sad. I can't imagine his parents' pain right now.

Unfortunately, from what I have read, I cannot conclude that Swartz was a good person; in fact destructively mis-guided; and it is ironic that he was persecuted by an appointee of a President whose policies he seemed to strongly support.

He appears to have had no regard for property or material values, was strongly biased against American corporations and opposed any role for money in politics. His view on economics and government spending seemed to be left-of-Krugman. In fact he seemed like a classic socialist anarchist.

He wanted the Democrats to spend without regard for the debt limit and for Obama to feel no power from the Tea Party or congressional Republicans.

He seemed sympathetic with the Occupy movement, Assange and may have been targeted because his actions were similar to Bradley Manning's.

I can't imagine too many around here would approve of these characteristics.

It's too bad that so many bright, bright kids think that they know better than the whole world that came before them.

And too bad that this one killed himself.

Wish I could be kinder.

Excellent work by Harris.

I was pleasantly surprised by his reasoning; perhaps I shouldn't have been.

Adam,

Serious issues indeed.

Also, it's amazing the kind of material that one can "produce" and actually get paid for;

that there are publications which would pay for that kind of nonsense.

Are the people running the NYT this stupid?

...OK, I take back the question.

Mike

One can only wonder if Ms. Dowd has ever used her mind for thinking.

This kind of bubbling stream of evasive drivel seems to be the only thing that many on the political left can issue from their minds at all.

I am too flabbergasted to try to follow it.

Mike

Nice. Thanks for the pointers.

Mike

http://realclearpoli...s_ideology.html

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/07/19/romney_it_s_the_ideology_stupid

Anyone got a link to a transcript?

Mike

Apparently, according to Rush's last fifteen (15) minutes today, Romney delivered a speech that I can support completely.

If, from the two (2) clips Rush played, are representative of the totality of the speech!

Damn, someone lit a fire under Goody Two Shoes' ass!

Seems like this O'bama Virginia truthful statement will put the final knife in his pitiful administration.

Adam

None of that argues for why it's legitimate for US or British governments to intervene. At best it argues that these companies had the right to take a private militia in, not bring in US soldiers to get killed because a businessman made a stupid decision about where to build a well.

Shayne

That's because I *wasn't* arguing for it's legitimacy.

I was (and do) contest your assertion that the coup led to anti-western sentiment.

I assert that you have it backwards: there already *was* anti-western sentiment;

the US and UK feared communist influences, and that led to the CIA intervention.

You are parroting the line that the coup led to anti-western feelings; and that is false.

On the other hand, I am sure that it did nothing to dissipate them...

Mike

Well, if we are looking for the "full context", please remember what triggered the 1953 coup:

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, after a period of great difficulty and fruitless exploration

(they nearly gave up on ever finding oil in Iran and had burned through their cash),

finally struck oil in 1908, and single-handedly turned Iran into a major producer.

Mossadegh thanked them by attempting forced nationalization of their company,

with broad public support. It is probably the case that AIOC (formerly APOC,

now BP) should have offered Iran a better deal by 1951.

In any case, anti-western feeling led to the 1953 coup, not the other way round.

Mike

I watched enough of it to tell that it's misleading at best, as they don't provide the full context for the source of anti-Americanism. E.g., they leave this important bit out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

Shayne

I want to start by saying that I appreciate that both LM and the cleric issuing the Fatwa are trying to save innocent lives. This is good.

Some here have expressed doubts as to the efficacy of such declarations; I will not add to this negativity.

Instead I will positively assert that Objectivist values include the Responsibility of Independent Judgement.

The very essence of a Fatwa stands in diametric opposition to this value.

We each have within us all that we need, to see evil for what it is, without needing some central authority to spell it out for us;

or to contradict our independent conclusions.

Mike

Interests: gazing into the abyss, fighting monsters from the id

Dr. Morbius,

I figure they could use your help over at ARI around about now;

their "monsters from the id" are getting seriously out-of-hand...

("The Forbidden Planet" is one of my old favorites too.

Watch out for that "brain boost"! It's a doozy!)

Mike

It is not hard to misinterpret a slight detail and end up thinking she was a fascist.

Actually it *is hard* to end up thinking that, if you're actually thinking clearly and reading carefully.

For those with muddled thinking, or knee-jerk emotional reactions, of course, reaching almost any conclusion is possible; and that is the real problem: readers who become irrational when confronted with ideas contrary to their assumed, ingrained norms.

Mike

Mandelbrot's greatest contribution to human knowledge was his demonstration of how great complexity can emerge from simple rules. I sometimes fear that most laymen do not get this, and are merely taken with the "trippy" imagery. The most striking example of this principle at work in nature is the human brain. The amount of digital data in our DNA, that holds all of the rules for the construction of our brains, is tiny compared to the complexity of the result. The mathematics of fractals is involved in this amazing translation.

Ultimately this kind of emergent complexity is a powerful point in any scientific refutation of the need for a Creator. The primitive idea that anything that could have given rise to us, must be greater than us, is precisely backwards. In nature, complexity arises from the mud and ascends to the heavens; not the other way around.

Mike

How reliable a source do you consider "To Whom It May Concern" to be?

I just want to say that I found Robert's post #50 to be really valuable.

Thank you, Robert.

Mike

Yet another example of how government funding of

science is vital

Bill,

You're wrong about that. You may have missed a third possible

funding model, besides science-for-profit and public funding:

philanthropic endowments, such as for universities and research

foundations like HHMI.

Government has no place funding research unless it relates to

a proper function of the state.

Rand did allow for the legitimacy of charity, but it is true

that she did not emphasize it's importance enough. It is

certainly true that science-for-profit will not answer all

of our questions for us.

Mike

Well, you've got to love RuPaul, so any excuse to post Supermodel.

I was being hyperbolic, referring to the anti-dead white men, "down with the patriarchy" tribe. You are aware that there is a movement, for example, to stop teaching US History prior to 1877? http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/02/03/north-carolina-schools-cut-chunk-history-lessons/

Ahh. Now I get the drift.

Thanks.

Mike

I just saw him say that they didn't teach your generation about Daniel Boone in high school. How ridiculous is that? (chuckling in disbelief)

TINA: Who?

ME: Daniel Boone!

TINA: Never heard of him.

...but there is a butt-load of reading I have to do (and so little time to do it).

The story of our lives! Books jump on my reading list faster than I now retire them...

Daniel Boone was my very favorite hero, when I was 7. And I'm not even an American!

Thanks for your thoughts, Michael.

Mike

Next you will be claiming that God created the fossils of the dinosaurs in order to fool the godless scientists, and that patriarchal dead white men invented the Roman empire in order to keep the LGBTQ community down.

Ted,

I've probably had too much wine, but what is it that you're referring to with the 2nd part of that sentence (the LGBTQ bit)?

Thanks very much.

Mike

No, I didn't need a RuPaul video as an LGBTQ illustration.

I was wondering about the "invention of the Roman empire" keeping RuPaul down, if you will.

(I got the "God created the fossils" conspiracy, just not the 2nd conspiracy.)

Thanks very much.

Mike

Next you will be claiming that God created the fossils of the dinosaurs in order to fool the godless scientists, and that patriarchal dead white men invented the Roman empire in order to keep the LGBTQ community down.

Ted,

I've probably had too much wine, but what is it that you're referring to with the 2nd part of that sentence (the LGBTQ bit)?

Thanks very much.

Mike

GW Said:

And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

For now, I strongly believe that the correct thing is to recognize the past as it happened, not as some historians (starting with Woodrow Wilson) tried to make it. If that means accepting the fact that the Founding Fathers (with a few exceptions) were Christians, if their own words prove that, then that is what we have to accept. Facts are facts and by all means, let us look at the Founding Fathers' own words, not some interpretation by an historian.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Michael you said that: "if their own words prove that, then that is what we have to accept."

They were politicians, right? Their lips were moving, right? What conclusions can we draw?

Only that that is what they said; not that that is what they believed.

Washington obviously believed that religion could be usefully leveraged to promote public order. That is the only thing that we can be sure of; not his religious beliefs.

Mike

The vast majority of innovators in my field are opposed to patents

I know. I began to suspect that you were a software engineer

when your opposition to patents became clear.

Mike

Fascinating. An Objectivist (I presume, perhaps incorrectly); an engineer (I understand);

and you're opposed to patent rights. I guess, eventually, I've seen everything. 8-)

A patent-less, corporation-less West, organized on Rothbardian principles, would have surrendered it's world to communism and/or fascism. You'll never convince me otherwise. We are about 2 centuries too far into the experiment, benefiting from patents, to imagine how the 20th century would have played-out without such property constructs. I'm betting that you wouldn't have liked it, Shayne.

So we need to violate morality, in order to preserve morality. Again, this is why you lost to Rothbard.

The context in which you can create things, with your own mind and property, is what you are not addressing. All the patents on all of the things which you can create in any historical context, eg. a screwdriver, have already expired. What is protected by patents now, are things like field-effect transistor variants, which never would have come into existence without patents and corporations. Unless perhaps by State Science Institutes.

Respectfully,

Mike

I am an Objectivist who would prefer that industrial capitalism should survive, and not perish. How would this survival happen if communists could share knowledge by confiscation, but capitalists could not share it by ownership and exchange? If corporations could not be created to tackle projects at the large scales that states can?

I am on very firm moral ground here. In the absence of patents, natural rights would be in greater danger, not less.

(Thank you for splitting off the thread, we were very OT.)

Mike

Mike: No I am not an ancap. Are you an Objectivist?

I'm glad you are admitting that patents violate rights. I wonder how you square that with "the moral is the practical."

Rothbard hasn't won anything. Are you an AnCap, BTW?

Natural rights are violated by patents. There, happy?

Secure borders also violate natural rights. We could go on.

Patents violate natural rights less than any alternative, however.

Specifically, permitting the 2nd inventor to use the new idea,

without compensating the 1st inventor, will cause all invention

to be done in secret. Boy will natural rights be buggered then.

A USA (I am Canadian, BTW) without a patent system would have

lost the Cold War and we'd both be arguing in a Gulag about now.

Talk about having a gun to your head.

Rand was wrong about some things but this isn't one of them.

Mike

This is why Rothbard has won. All you are doing is repeating ad nauseam pragmatist arguments.

Have you been so divested of morality that you cannot see any issues of natural rights violation with regards to patents? It's not complicated: I think of something, I transform my property. You then whine that you "thought of it first" and put a gun to my head. It's "patently" obvious there's a problem here.

Michael,

Don't worry about the Robbins video.

Thanks for all the tips.

Mike

1. I merely presented those videos as an introduction and an indication that all is not well on the level of normative abstractions in O-Land. Since Peikoff claims that every "is" implies an "ought," thus there is a total blending of cognitive with normative, I felt this was a good place to start. There is nothing within his cognitive universe that explains the behaviors you observe in those videos (being that they can be replicated and have been) other than saying something like "evasion" or whatnot. Obviously, cognitive science (and even persuasion studies) has developed a long ways since then. I'll be adding more stuff later, possibly in a new thread. These new things will probably be more in line with what you are seeking.

Apropos and on a whim (how's that for un-Objectivist? ), I discovered an absolutely fabulous blog by a young fiction writer who is also deep into brain science: Livia Blackburne, A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing. If you bop around her site a bit, you will come across all kinds of cool stuff, albeit mostly in introductory form. It has even started me thinking in directions like "story concept" (for lack of a better term) as a particular type of abstraction, just like cognitive and normative are. (See her older post called "Narrative and the Brain," for instance.)

2. I will need to find another copy of that video. I have to run right now, but I'll look into it later.

3. Thank you very much. I also sent you an email of thanks.

4. Upload your picture as an avatar. You can upload it as "photo" and as "avatar" in your settings. You only did the "photo" upload. You can use the same picture for "avatar," but you have to do a new upload. If you have any problem with this, please let me know.

Michael