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The fact that existence exists doesn't prove that existence exists independently of any mind. Thoughts exist, but they aren't mind-independent.

Why do you believe Rand opposed homosexuality? I think it's because of a lack of understanding of the nature of same-sex attraction.

Shayne,

1. Your use of "government" faces a certain demarcation problem. What is the "government" that anarchists uniformly oppose? As for anarchism being incoherent, here's my definition: one who opposes centralized, hierarchical authority. Thus, all anarchists are anti-statists, but one can be an anti-statist without being fully anarchist.

2. Yes, I'm a teenager. However, that doesn't make my argument any less valid. To say otherwise is a blatant ad hominem.

Jackie:

Without assuming what my opinion is of a market anarchist society, how would that "society" handle a:

1) Charles Ponzi; or

2) Bernard L. Madoff;

Adam

Well, Ponzi was the financial planner for fascist Italy, so he'd be out of a job.

Madoff could be punished for fraud.

Brant, Ted, you're not responding like individualists. As horrible as Pearl Harbor was, we needed to punish only those people who bombed us. Anything else would be a compromise of principles. Same with 9/11.

By your lights you aren't either. "We" didn't get bombed. "We" did "punish" "those people who bombed us." The problem was getting at them. So "only" was quite impossible.

--Brant

That sounds awfully like a tu quoque fallacy.

Mike,

1. You can't say that killing innocent people is justified because we're fighting people they are ruled by. The US military takes all responsibility for civilian casualties, morally speaking.

2. Perhaps we could win if we loosened or eliminated the rules of engagement, but at what cost? Any "victory" gained through torture and murder is Pyrrhic at best.

3. There would be strong social pressure against crime in a market anarchist society, including boycotts from private services... and in a market anarchist society, most everything would be private.

Brant, Ted, you're not responding like individualists. As horrible as Pearl Harbor was, we needed to punish only those people who bombed us. Anything else would be a compromise of principles. Same with 9/11.

I often hear from pro-war Objectivists that the Iraq and/or Afghanistan wars are in self-defense. Self-defense of who? The response seems to always be "America". What is America? Certainly not a self. Is it the US government? Is it the people living under the US government? Is it US supporters of the US government? US opponents of the US government? Everyone in North America? South America? Both Americas? Supporters of "the American ideal"?

None of those things are people. They are all collectives. To support war as "self-defense" is to give rights to collectives.

The collectives consist of real live people who sweat and bleed.

Ba'al Chatzaf

You know who else is a real life person who sweats and bleeds? The innocent Afghan villager whose children died in a drone attack.

Mike,

1. I'm not an ancap. I'm a market anarchist, but I'm not an ancap.

2. My argument isn't based on Kantian skepticism. It's based on individualism.

3. There would still be laws in market anarchy, they just would be enforced non-monopolistically.

As a practical matter I can understand the difference between state and government, but as far as I can tell ideal government is still force respecting rights' violators--okay--and the necessity of financing which I cannot see being a la Objectivism "voluntary taxation" especially for an enormous country like the United States. Regardless, Utopian theorizing at its worst results in horrible tyrannies as power-hungry idealists try to force people into structures in which they'll be perfected as human beings acting in ways considered proper not mattering at all really what it's called. It's all top down, a trap even Rand fell into, with her judge in Colorado perfecting the U.S. Constitution. She effectively let the masses be self-immolated by their corrupt altruist-statist system so her heroes wouldn't have to get their hands dirty. Of course that immolation was mostly blanked out and ignored but it did peek through the curtains here and there. That might be called the natural justice of the general situation. She missed the boat on critical thinking, the importance of individual rights and heroes: her heroes were the likes of Dagny and Hank, who ceased being heroes when they went Galt (x the rescue at the end) with the minor exception of Francisco who had to destroy his business empire and Ragnar doing his pirate thing.

--Brant

pardon the brevity and gross over-simplification for a subject that needs a long article or even a book

Well, anarchists wouldn't want to force anything on anyone.

Who is this "OP" you keep referring to?

Internet forum slang for 'original poster,' I think.

Ahh, William, I think that is correct. I could not for the life of me come up with another idea.

I thought Objectivist Philosophy was pretty clever though.

But then Shayne would accuse me of pandering....

Whenever anyone takes a side in a debate besides Shayne's, he accuses that person of pandering.

2 points:

1. Anarchism isn't against laws, it's against rulers. An anarchist opposes authoritarianism and centralized power, not rules.

Anarchism is against government, thus it is against even non-authoritarian forms, such as government of consensually delegated authority, i.e., representatives.

2. Ageism is irrational collectivism, pure and simple.

Yeah, and two-year-olds might be able to create a grand unified theory of physics... Wouldn't want to be "ageist" and think they probably couldn't.

Shayne

1. Anarchists do not oppose all forms of governance. Anarchists oppose the state and all other forms of authoritarianism and centralization

2. Ageism is prejudice based on age alone. Obviously, two year olds aren't as smart as adults. However, that's not stereotyping or discrimination based on age.

You're being intellectually dishonest. You argue based on certain idiosyncratic if not downright false definitions of terms and call out anyone who doesn't call out these definitions.

Studio, I was using left-libertarian to refer specifically to the contemporary movement, which I'd say was codified by Sam Konkin, though the tendency dates back to Proudhon.

Shayne, I love how you resort to petty insults when people say things that disagree with your unproven generalized assertions.

Studio, not all left-libs believe in the LTV. The founder of the philosophy, Sam Konkin, did not, nor does Roderick Long or Brad Spangler. All of those people are entirely Austrian in economic theory. Even Kevin Carson incorporates subjective aspects in his interpretation of the LTV. However, left-libertarians usually do use a negative definition of capitalism. I know I have. However, no left-libertarian wants to stop "exploitation" through force.

SJW, you're generalizing wildly. Roderick Long considers himself an Aristotelean and has spoken positively of Rand in the past, and the founder of the left-libertarian forums follows Aristotelean virtue ethics.

Jackie,

I just listened to "All of the Lights."

Helluva 'n arrangement. I started getting excited with all the fanfares and stuff and thinking, "Woah! I like this!"

Then after it got real good, Kayne came in.

Biiirrrrrzzzzzzz... poof... He fizzled down my high with some really lame-sounding rap...

Oh well...

The kids like him, I guess.

Still, it's a fantastic arrangement. And Kayne's part is thankfully small. I'm glad I listened to it.

Michael

Yeah, it isn't one of his better raps. However, he can be very good as a rapper sometimes-for instance, on his song Diamonds from Sierra Leone.

Thanks very much! I'm an economist by education (MBusEcon and BEcon), and I'd consider myself Austrian school (as well as Evolutionary; the two are consistent). I admit whilst I respect the Mises Institute as a source for Austrian writings and scholarship, some of their members can be a bit insular and intellectually cultish (like the Orthodox Objectivists). Plus, the paleo-libertarian cultural conservatism of some of them grates against my gothic, cosmotarian sensitivities

If you ever want to talk about economics or anything, feel free to PM me.

Gary North isn't even a paleolib, though. He's a Christian Reconstructionist, and that horrifies me.

I think that even within Objectivism, 2 things will always be subjective:

1. Qualia. Qualia are the individual's personal mental experiences of, for example, the redness of an evening sky or the sour taste of a lemon. A good description would be what it is like to experience something-a quality judged differently from person to person, knowable only through direct experience.

2. Economic value. Economic value does not inhere in the nature of a good in some mystical way. It is created through people's own desires and needs. You can find a very good treatment of this in Human Action, by Von Mises.

So, there you go. 2 subjective things.

Here are some interesting links pertaining to agorism and left-libertarianism*:

all-left.net

agorism.info

leftlibertarian.org

c4ss.org

radgeek.com

aaeblog.com

*Left-libertarianism should not be confused with movements such as anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian Marxism. It is strongly pro-market.

I often hear from pro-war Objectivists that the Iraq and/or Afghanistan wars are in self-defense. Self-defense of who? The response seems to always be "America". What is America? Certainly not a self. Is it the US government? Is it the people living under the US government? Is it US supporters of the US government? US opponents of the US government? Everyone in North America? South America? Both Americas? Supporters of "the American ideal"?

None of those things are people. They are all collectives. To support war as "self-defense" is to give rights to collectives.

Kind of like the fact that L. Ron Hubbard was a child molester doesn't refute belief in aliens?

Kinda... wait, he was?

Why do Objectivists use the term "capitalism" to describe a free-market society based on classical liberal principles? It seems that would overemphasize the role of capital and alienate people who come from leftist backgrounds.

Welcome to OL Jackie.

Make yourself comfortable.

Where are you from?

Adam

geez I am getting to feel like the welcome wagon in a virtual neighborhood

I'm from Seattle.

Dunno. I have some Objectivist ideas and some not-so-Objectivist ideas. I said "no", though, because I don't identify as Objectivist.

OP's argument is presuming that the self in solipsism has a cause. The self could've always existed, like the Abrahamic god. Instead, here's a better argument against solipsism:

Obviously, in solipsism not everything is a conscious creation of the mind, since things can't be altered through sheer desire alone. Thus, there must be an unconscious mind that creates the world. This becomes functionally equivalent to realism. Since solipsism is unnecessary complexity, it can thus be eliminated via Occam's Razor.

The OP is misunderstanding ethical egoism. A truly rational egoist is a social egoist. You cannot live in a society without affecting other people, and you can only truly fulfill your own self-interest by treating other people in a way that creates positive social relations. The self-interest of one individual and that of another are not mutually exclusive.

Also, psychopaths shouldn't be forced to do anything, because force messes everything up.

Michael, good advice. I'm refreshed by how non-dogmatic you are, as is evidenced here and in your guidelines page.

I quite like Kanye. For a while I dismissed pretty much all modern rap out of hand if it wasn't sufficiently indie, but I'm over that. Really, I don't consider myself primarily a fan of hip-hop, or indie rock, or rockabilly, or drum and bass, or thrash, or whatever. I consider myself a fan of good music.

Studio, I think you're sorta judging Kanye out of hand without actually listening to much of his work. While he collaborates with some glammy artists, he doesn't really fall into that category himself. He does sometimes veer towards that, or towards self-aggrandizement more generally, but it's not really a defining feature of his work. BTW, it's cool that you like Austrian economics. I do as well, though I was banned from the Mises Institute forums for lashing out at the Institute over Gary North.

I'm 14 (one of the youngest people here!). I'm not really an Objectivist, but I'm interested in it.

I think he's naively misunderstanding what the Mafia are actually like. However, that doesn't have any bearing on polycentric law as a concept.