john42t

Then I misunderstood your comment. No, I meant rape. As in, when you are the loser in the classroom and three guys hold you down while another shoves something into you. The motivation in that case isn't sexual gratification but to install a peck order. I don't think it's commonplace. I think it's fairly frequent. Difficult to guess, but I'd be surprised if it was more rare than once a week somewhere for a country like Germany, the US having worse numbers in urban areas. That kind of indignation is highly selective. I never see it applied when kids do it to each other (unfortunate circumstances), nor when it's done to grown men (they can't get traumatized) or even criminals in prison (they deserve it). But then in those other cases one can't win brownie points by playing the righteous, nor can one by opposing public education.

If I extrapolate my own experiences with public schooling, though harmless in comparison, but take into account that things are probably worse today and that the American situation will be worse than that of Germany, I would expect rapings in public institutions, especially schools, to be fairly frequent. You have consider that in most incidents perpetrators will be other youths. So yes, I consider stories about sexual violence in public institutions as trivial as stories about major setbacks in the middle east peace process. Compared to the institutionalized crippling of the young in public schooling in general (ideologically and by the nature of being kept in dependence) the fact that some of those vicitms *also* have something shoved up their orifices is as trivial as shrapnels in WWII. You are telling me your excitement comes from the wish to *protect*? I'm sorry, I don't buy it. I've heard it so often in my own youth and it was a lie. It's only the usual con-game of playing who appears to care most. Just look at the intellectual level I'm attacked on in this thread: Spelling mistakes, bad mores in Europe, that's all that comes. You could as well care about the environment, the oppression of women, free software or some other do-gooder crap of your choice. But children are the more potent weapon I suppose.

Which is the argument of all people who's values are rejected: That if I can't have your values, I can have none? Of course you know the matter I called trivial isn't ethics but the story at hand. You chose to ignore that in order to deliver a cheap shot.

Astonishing level of emotions about such a trivial topic. I've come to accept that the vast majority is evil, but that doesn't seem to be the sentiment here. Most people of my childhood were cheering the horrors behind the iron curtain. I'm way to cynical to get emotional about some petty criminals.

As altruistic as genes, yes. That's reciprocal altruism and kin selection. Rand didn't know much about evolution. All the more kudos to her to have said nothing that contradicts the theory. She was talking about *sacrificing values*. Being kind is usually *not* altruism. A mother risking her life to save the loved offspring is usually *not* altruism. Both are usually merely adequate expressions of one's values. They *can* be sacrifical: A host nurturing a cuckoo, for example.

Interesting that Gandhi called himself 'totally egoistic' because everything he did was to attain Moksha. Fascinating, I didn't know that. Strictly speaking not the egoism itself, only the believe in this Moksha thing. Most irrational egoists are irrational on the question of egoism/altruism, a person who is an altruist for consciously selfish reasons out of a flaw in other parts of his knowledge is probably not nearly as common. Or maybe it is, who knows what most people think...

Embarrassing. I'm going to bed now...

I can't see much common ground there. Orthos don't whine about fascism and corporations.

So was Rand; speaking of that, I already made a about how fetishism neatly fits into the Objectivist picture. :-)

Michael, The effect is the same here in Germany. All ideology over here is collectivist, the amoral pragmatics of every-day life are who keep the show running. Rand is unknown (or any individualist ideology for that matter). Rand's not the one causing this, it's a side effect of mysticism. Rand's the cure. And I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for my parents. My arian race. My country, my culture. This is what I believed before I read Rand: That I have a *duty* to my country / society to have kids. That, despite not wanting kids, it's the moral thing to do *for the sake of society*. My motivation was not the love of my potential children, but the affirmation of this "collective" I had in my head. I would have (unjustly) hated my children and they would have (justly) hated me in return as soon as they figured out what's wrong with me. Classical Kantian deontology. I can't thank Rand enough to have spanked that sickness out of my head.

Plus she's regarded as a philosopher by a lot of people outside the universities. Many sciences have seen heretics who were laughed out first. If they were right, they gained a following, sometimes only after their death. But eventually their heresies became accepted into the canon and stopped being heresies. But Rand's already enormously successful outside the departments. She's probably the most influential intellectual in American history. And they still won't admit that it might have something to do with her ideas being true - they just keep ignoring and ridiculing her. That is the main reason why I don't trust the respective faculties.

I just re-read the beginning of this thread and I think someone needs to say something fundamental about fascism. First, fascism is leftist-code for authoritarianism in the sense of strict law enforcement. The real fascism of italy and Nazi Germany is a collectivist ideology, one can indeed detect in America, but only with a microscope (tribal nationalism, racism and national socialism). People who say America is fascist are employing the usual leftist strawman. Communism isn't the reaction to authoritarianism, it is exactly the other way round. People are willing to grant the state more power *because* they see Occupy Wall Street and fear that these people might have their way. I'm one of them. Evil comes from the irrational mob, not self-interested corporations. And also: I strongly disapprove of the equality of rights of all men. I believe it is proper for man to be free, that his individual liberty is a necessity for his mind to function freely and that a good law takes this into account. By no means I embrace the notion that it is necessary or even desirable that they are all *equally* free. What good would that do? If collectivism is no longer part of the definition of fascism, I'm proudly a fascist.

I don't think it is different from Compatibilism. Or rather Compatibilism is compatible to Objectivism. Objectivism doesn't concern itself with the question of total causality, that's part of physics. Objectivism is concerned with people who argue with physical arguements against free will in order to discourage the ambitious and excuse the criminal.

There's one argument I want to add: Rand herself is still not accepted as an intellectual. The humanities keep excluding her, branding her as a populist novelist not to be taken seriously. If they weren't evil, why would they do that? Even if you disagree with 80% of her statements, she's still way above all the vodoo that's going on in the social sciences and philosophy departments. And again, it's only the universities I'm talking about, and it's not pessimism. Beck & Coulter are intellectuals too, but they pay their own bills.

Well, he did throw away his position as federal minister to found the Linkspartei. That matches my theory that all evil comes from the irrational: He believe his altruism. He believes he's fighting for the oppressed. Yes, Lafontaine envisages the rich to be altruistic, not himself. Presumably he thinks his sacrifice consists in being the star of a new party and being cheered as the hero of the oppressed. Dawkins does it even, he distanced himself from the "Selfish Gene" (especially the title) and is now preaching how seflish genes lead to altruistic human beings when he's not preaching about the alleged evils of Christianity.

Nice piece, and here you do call everything science, presumably including maths. I prefer that terminology. About the wiki thing, that's about what I would have expected. A definition by non-essentials. They basically say the soft-sciences are those that don't work that well. (Empiricism can't be part of the definition as maths isn't empirical and presumable very hard, and I presume in this context, maths counts as science. Computer science is also rather hard and rather non-empirical.) Of course they mean the soft sciences *can't* work that well, whereas I put it down to neo-mystical corruption and believe they can be just a precise as the rest (except for maths which is always more precise). Looking forward to the next piece.

It's *because* I believe in division of labor that I made this point, most people shouldn't invest at all. Bob made the point that everybody has to invest, but I believe this to be a strawman. It's true that once you earned money, you need to chose what to do with it. Keeping it in currency on your bank account might count as "investing in currency" or buying your own home as "investing in real estate", but that obfuscates that there are two disctinct things you can do with your money: First, try to *save* it. You minimize the risk as much as possible. Second, try to make value by investing it (in real estate not being your home, company shares, etc). The crucial difference is that in the latter case you *know* something others don't - you create value with that knowledge, it becomes your profession. If you can do the latter well, you might want to give up the other profession anyway, as investment is very rewarding. You're not likely to be doing this with your life savings though. There is a grey area between those two things, which is why you can easily make a strawman out of it. As to your analogy: If the profession in question is investment, it's the wrong way round. If you give money, you're not using the services of an investor, you are one. If the profession in question is banking, I think that they made the wrong choice in believing that a single man is a better bank than the traditional institutions. I want to add something to this line of reasoning: Germany is more collectivist, but also much more conservative fiscally. Far less people gamble with their money the way Americans appear to do, and that goes for the small man as much as for larger corporations. Risk-taking is an American character trait, being boring is a German one. German movies are lame, but Germany did come out of the finance crisis pretty well and, despite my complaint about all the whiners around here, there is an element of awareness about the shared guilt of the gambling small man. There is something very healthy in the believe in solid, conservative banking.

I wasn't phrased seriously, and I shouldn't have done it that way, sorry about that. I also wanted to thank you for your proper answer about the draft question in the other thread, that was a neat overview. Let's see if I can get another chunk of information out of you. Here's where I'm coming from: I'm German, the German language maps to different concepts in regards to the above. The best translation for "science" is "Wissenschaft", but "Wissenschaft" includes the humanities (and history) as well as philosophy and mathematics. In fact the humanities are called "Geisteswissemschaften" ("sciences" of spirit) as opposed to "Naturwissenschaften" (natural sciences). So I basically take "Wissenschaft" to mean: Figuring things out. And they are split into subdisciplines, maths being very special and the most clearly defined subdiscipline, philosophy being the foundation of all knowledge - as knowledge is hierarchical. I suppose your definitions/categories are different. My questions would be this: Where do you take yours from? Do you believe there's a common agreement on them? If so, what makes you confident that those agreed-on definitions are not themselves an example of neo-mystical corruption? (Supposed you actually believe that the corruption exists or runs that deep.)

In modern parlance, "hard science" means: It gets results. As opposed to what philosophers and the humanities do - which is, of course, also science, and very important, and lots of tax money should go there, yes, yes. It's just, umm.. "different" and you can't expect to get any reliable answers. That's "not hard science". Everything else is the neo-mystical coverup of this ugly truth. Rand said: Philosophy can be true or false, it doesn't have to be the wish-wash that it's painted to be. Depends on what you call predominantly. Most people don't get boolean algebra either. And there's plenty of sheep on the meadows who are not even capable of rational thought. But then those don't get to vote a government.

Oskar Lafontaine, co-founder of the Linkspartei. Intellectual is a big word for this person, but in Germany the standards are so low that you qualify with very little. Political leader is more accurate though. This article contains the relevant quotation: http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/2006/03/linksruck.htm Did you say you were German too? Didn't memorize this properly.

True, it's only hard science as understood by Rand. Philosophy as understood by philosophy professors is (neo-)mysticism. This in itself is one of the core tenets of Objectivism: That a philosophy can be correct or not. That it's a science rather than a flavor. If that's true, and if Objectivism is true to a large extent, then it will survive like boolean logic and for the same reason. If not, it was a religion and cult like any other.

People were talking about philosophical/religious systems. And philosophy is a hard science.

If you're not a professional investor, why would you invest? Life savings are not to be invested, but saved. No single person can have a reputation that warrants a trust with life savings. Gold, real estate, currency in savings accounts with banks older than a hundred years. I have a thousand times more sympathy with the old lady that stores her bucks in the cookie jar and it gets stolen than with people who invest their savings while not being investors. Investor is a profession.

We're probably not too far away from each other. I don't believe it's all Kant's fault. I merely think there's a good chance he shares more guilt than the others. Then there's the alleged contradiction: It's not a contradiction. I'm a loner myself in some way, I'm just sceptical of other loners, I know many leftist activists who don't get along with anyone. There's the mob and there's the intellectual leader of the mob. Only the latter is a loner and whether the mob likes what he says is important (this is a simplification, of course). The last thing is the most important I believe and that's where we really can't get together, point 1. I wouldn't call it pessimism. I'm more optimistic than people in this forum, for example. The world's going to be great, I can't share all the gloominess that is often expressed here. But it's true, my picture of the intellectual world is much more malevolent that Rand's even. But I'm very optimistic: I'm sure they've lost.

Ruhr valley, that's near the Netherlands. Sexuality is very relaxed here (again, feminism is wearing off). Companies can even pay prostitutes for salesmen as incentive and get away with it (this is still an exception though).