Sum Ergo Cogitabo

Taking Children Seriously is a philosophical school that treats children as autonomous moral beings with the same rights as adults. One of the core beliefs of TCS is that children are just as rational as adults, they just know less (hence them making more obvious mistakes and being wrong more often.) As a consequence we should never force children to do anything against their will (this includes things like going to school or brushing their teeth.) Here is the website for more information http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/ What are your thoughts on the truth of this theory and its compatibility with Objectivism?

Mere speeches are not grounds for war. It's not the speeches that are the grounds for war, so much as the genuine intent behind them.

Okay so maybe John Galt was the blueprints for an ideal man, which Rand didn't wish to flesh out because any more content would be purely personal and not fully objective.

This is a gem. Richard Feynman tends to very good.

I speak of Iran specifically because it is by far the most powerful regime committed to the destruction of Western values and were the regime to reform significantly in the right direction, the power-base of the Middle East and Islamic terrorism would swiftly fail. One of the key problems with Iran currently is that it believes its current ideology is necessary in order stay 'true to Islam', which is the cornerstone of the Islamic world. However historically there was a period from the 8th to the 13th century known as the Islamic Golden Age, whereby the Middle East managed to harmonise Islam with (comparatively) liberal traditions. Holy books are often riddled with contradictions. The Koran is no exception to this. Whilst there are plenty of parts to justify the kind of regime Iran has now, there are also parts which are relatively peaceful, and it these that the scholars of the Islamic Golden Age chose to follow, in much the same way as most modern Western Christians only follow the relatively liberal parts of the Bible. I think the most rational approach one can take, besides advocating military intervention, towards Iran and the Islamic world is to encourage them to rediscover the Golden Age of Islam. This solves their problem of Islam needing to be a cornerstone of their society and is also great for the West because it means an end to terrorism.

The United States of America, and Israel especially, would be perfectly within their rights to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. Ahmadinejad has not only been constantly utterly opposed to America and praised those who are working to bring about its destruction, but also actively funds terrorist groups in Iran and across the Middle East, one of which was directly responsible for 9/11, an act of Islamic terrorism that claimed the lives of thousands of American civilians. If Iran, or Islamic terrorists via their support, were to get hold of nuclear weapons there seems to be no doubt that they would use them against the US. As for Israel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said with full sincerity that he wishes to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. If Iran gained nuclear weapons this nightmare could actually become reality.

Depends what you mean by the word 'real'. If we are talking about the descriptive sense, as in people we are likely to come across in everyday life, then I don't think any of the major characters are very real. That's kind of the point; Rand was a Romantic not a Naturalist. She wrote about what could and ought to be not what was. That being said, I share your sentiment towards Galt. He didn't have much of a personality (a person isn't just a metaphysical statement). Again however, this was intentional on the part of Rand. Galt wasn't meant to be so much a person as the embodiment of her views on the ideal man. I think any fleshing out of individual quirks would have run the risk of diminishing this.