john42t

I didn't write they were not victims, but since I easily could have written something like that in the heat of the moment, let's assume I did. Suppose a bum on the street tells you he knows how to duplicate all your savings with alien technology. But he needs *all* your money. And a bottle of wine. You give him the money, he wastes it all. Is he guilty? Yes. Are you a victim? Well, yes, I was wrong. You're one hell of a victim then. :-) One of the reasons I might appear a bit jerky on this topic is that I see people blaming bankers all the time, in the US and Germany alike. And they don't blame the criminals, they mean all bankers.

You mean if it happened to a person dear to me (or myself) I should better whine, shift blame on someone else and ask for the government to make this world more to my liking? I don't want the government out of this because I think I'm smarter than everyone or because I don't have sympathy with people who make bad decisions. I just believe in the principle that people are responsible for what they do. What about Lehman Brothers?According to wikipedia, Lehman Brothers was doing investment banking and the little guy's gradma wasn't likely to have her savings there. But I could be mistaken. I'm German, and I have almost no knowledge about the reputation of American banks. Here in Germany, all people who lost money were gambling. Some had they money in Island! I'm way too fascist for that argument. :-) I don't excuse the perpetrators. Madoff deserves to go to prison. I just think that all the people who lost their money to him should be a bit humbled too. They have a lesson to learn. Age? I'm 32 and not a native speaker. Is idiot not the right word for someone who gambles with his life savings? I wouldn't be so harsh in my choice of words when everybody around me wouldn't constantly excuse people who can't deal with money and demand more regulations to compensate. Having nicer words and feeling sorry for them is for when it's agreed that it's their fault.

Wow. You are really nuts over there. :-)

By and large, I agree with this characterization, but I'm puzzled as to when you are shot. Do you mean literally shot? America still has more freedom of speech than the rest of the world ever had. It also has a much more diverse ideological landscape than any other society in the history of mankind. So what do you mean by "stepping out of line" and what does "shot" stand for? Death penalty is reserved for murder I believe.

How many of those people weren't women?

I made a longer post previously, but let me cut to the chase. Not only would I point the gun, I'd pull the trigger. What if the one of the parties is about to fraudulently steal the other's life savings? Oh, but that's not consensual anymore? What if the fraud is a little more well concealed? Maybe he sells you 75% of the equity in his company, then turns around and sells 75% to someone else? That shit's been done. Shouldn't he be able to make any financial instrument he wants? Well, yes. Of course. If someone wants to give his life savings to a guy (Madoff, for example) and believes that this is a good idea, he *deserves* to lose it. Clearly the honest banker doesn't deserve to be punished with regulations just because other people are guilty (aka stupid, irrational). Put your money on a savings account of a *reputable* bank, such as the Deutsche Bank, and you won't lose it, it's that simple. Don't gamble, don't give your money to people you don't know and whose business model you don't understand. All those people who lost their money in the finance crisis aren't vicitims. They are idiots. We don't need more regulation, we need more deserved reality for the idiots. How else will they learn? The catastrophy is that the Zeitgeist excused the idiots and shifted the blame on the bankers. Not even Madoff deserves the bulk of the blame, let alone the honest part of banking. That being said, I don't think America is knocking on the door of fascim. There are some fascinating similarities to the Weimar Republic, but the differences overweight the similarities substantially. Especially the internet makes a great difference for the better.

I believe the law is evil. Private people should be allowed to make contracts in any way they wish, including sexual services. Within a company, it's the employer's liberty to define rules of conduct. The state should have no say in the matter.

A lot also depends on correctness. I believe that boolean logic is going to survive for a long time unchanged without any need for an institution. I have almost as much optimism for Rand's ideas.

EDIT: I don't agree that in the last quotation the two proposed ethics are their opposite. Why do you think they are not opposites? That statement was mostly meant as a negative - to exempt this bit from my agreement stated earlier. I could say various things, but the most important bit is that I don't think individualism is an ethics for "supermen-type individuals". It's for human beings. The only connection to your description is that great minds suffer from collectivism first. But that's only a matter of degree. There's no doubt in my mind that the authors of the declaration had been such manipulators. What do you do you think their 'goal' was? They will have believed their goal was to do the right thing. To be "good". They will have believed that because their social environment believed it. Their social environment believed it because that environment consisted of an unhealthy selection of societial subgroups: People employed by the government (they want to believe that they are useful for something even if they are not), professors (also often in the first group, know a lot of things that no one needs), activists (people without purpose who run around in the world trying to make it better without understanding it). All these people don't *earn* their living in the real sense of the word: They will all want to believe that every human being has a right to all the things in the charter. Because: If not all human beings have a right to them, do they? That's their motive. They are egoists, but not not consciously so. They are irrational. It's the same motive as that of the Marxists, the early Christians and many other of those who bring irrational thought into the world. Yes, but I don't believe they are the ultimate cause of evil. Without the irrational, it couldn't work: There would be less gullibility and more precise law enforcement. Yes, it's a common theme in many religions. It's indeed interesting to see oneself agreeing with certain ideas that belong to a completely alien ideology one is otherwise rejecting thoroughly. A much cooler example is with actual reasoning: There's a popular German intellectual leftist who compared Leftism to Islam and saw a lot of common ground. He was rather detailed: collectivism, altruism, anti-ursury. I fully agree. I just think it's both evil and he thinks it's both good. The man is a net-tax-receiver, never earned an honest living.

I'm curious, do you know in what way Nietzsche was influenced by Kant? As for the rest, it basically comes down to different premises, as usual. My most important premise as to evaluating intellectuals is: 1. Irrational con-jobs are everywhere. People trying to fool you into jumping off the cliff are the norm. And neither do they known that they do it, nor do they have a low IQ. They are just resentful and sub-consciously thinking in the evil direction. I'm especially distrustful if it comes from loners and people who never successfully practiced a solid profession - they have reasons to be resentful. The rest have reasons to believe their profession and their lifestyle is the center of the universe. On top of that comes: 2. When someone is difficult to understand (especially on something that should be rather simple) I am even more distrustful. There has to be a good reason to give this person the benefit of the doubt. 3. Whether someone believes himself good/pro-reason/libertarian/individualist is largely immaterial, as the understanding of these terms is extremely bad(supposed we two even agree on a meaning). 4. When people are liked by a majority and the wrong kind of person (net-tax-receivers), it's time to get worried. 5. When then other, later intellectuals are quoting the guy positively and also fall into this category a candidacy for arch-villain status should be considered. Those other intellectuals will never be slavish reproducers, they wouldn't be noteworthy intellectuals if they did. The only thing that matters is that they exhibit the same characteristics listed so far and *like* the former intellectual. (Yes, liking is all, they don't even need to take any single actual idea to make me suspicious.) I'm sure his grossest quotations could be saved by defining duty in a peculiar way. I suppose I could take the categorical imperative and make it work by taking egoism as a principle and live by that. But that's not what he had in mind and it's not how it got interpreted. The Germans interpreted him the evil way. I don't object to any single fact you mentioned, and I suppose I could give him the benefit of the doubt, but there is point 1 and 2. If it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, why would I waste my time with an autopsy? I tell you this in this form because you seem to know a lot more details about this that I do - if you think there's something that would convince me while I'm standing on above premises, I'd be interested to learn about it. And tell me what Nietzsche took from him, that's a guy on my to-check-out-properly list.

Yes, that could be meant by it. Let's call this obligation (I believe that's what the article calls it) for the sake of this discussion. I don't think the human rights charter is talking about a contract -otherwise it wouldn't say you have a duty to community, but a duty to whomever you have a contract with. You don't have a contract with a community. (The latter idea is the con-job of the social contract theory.) Supernatural being (God) and society are Rand's prime examples. The duty towards the latter is what the human rights charter is talking about. There's no doubt in my mind that the authors of the declaration had been such manipulators. I also have no doubt that no such manipulator consciously knows that he is that. Evil comes from the irrational, and the irrational never knows what it's doing. There is no *conscious* evil that manipulates in the actual sense of the word "manipulate". All evil is unconscious.

Reminds me of Zeitgeist, which I did not regret seeing (as it's an interesting insight into how left-libertarians tick). I find such flicks fascinating. The frequency in which people devise new mystical ideologies is going up fast. This one combines aliens with left-libertarianism. Mormonism combined aliens with Christianity and was very successful.

Mercanaries are fighting voluntarily, so did the rest of George's army, right? The Americans had to draft their countrymen in order to win the war, is that correct? These are honest questions. You're the expert, my knowledge on this topic is extremely superficial.

Maybe I again didn't read the postings carefully enough, but the way I see it Dennis only stated his judgement of Jillette, which fits my first impression of the man (didn't know him until this thread). To make such condemnation on an Objectivist forum seems appropriate enough to me.

How's Kant's ethics not evil? He said that moral actions are only those coming from duty, didn't he? The categoric imperative works to the same effect. And Kant was highly influential. In Germany he's probably up until today one of the most highly regarded philosophers. I can easily believe that Rand got his motivations wrong, didn't read him, whatever. But does that change her diagnosis of him being an arch-villain? Don't argue that he was smart and right about a lot of things, that's immaterial. Tell me how his ethics isn't evil or how he wasn't influential.

Well, if you already see it in this context, isn't there a rather ugly question begged? After all, any collectivist who wanted to "persuade" "fence-sitters" and "potential loyalists" (think internationalist/zionist) to move under one's own national rule needs an irrational ideology to justify it with - I assume this bit to be uncontroversial in this forum. Now I don't know about you, but "self-evident" in regards to something that sounds nice and is written in a political declaration gets my mysticism-alarm ringing. "Sacred and undeniable" doesn't make it any better. When I then take into account that many scholars have written big books about what it could have meant, then I have a working theory, and it's not a nice one. The fact that a war followed (with drafted men) comes on top of that. I'm sorry guys, but I'm with the fence-sitters and loyalists. But I promise I'll wave the flag from 1933 on. And not criticize any founding father until it's over in 1990.

I doubt that the charter means the respecting the rights of others when it talks about duty. I believe it has much more to do with taxes. After all, someone has to pay for all the perks it lists before it comes to talk about duty. It wasn't going to be the net-tax-receivers that produced the document. I have no duties in the sense that the charter means. No one has them, it's an irrational con job. Rand wrote an article about it, a summary can be found here. I fully agree with that article, and it's written so well I couldn't add anything to it. I fully agree with this statement, but if you mean that I or Rand promoted such an ethics, I hold that this is a strawman. I don't know whether Nietzsche did it. Community is a crucial necessity for the individual. This fact is one powerful weapon in the hands of the collectivists. EDIT: I don't agree that in the last quotation the two proposed ethics are their opposite.

Article 92.I: Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. I especially love the Orwellian way of putting it: how it's in the individuals interest. Slavery is freedom. Which services it covers in detail is irrelevant to the question of slavery. They agree with Michael Moore on that it is by and large more moral than the US one, as everyone has free access. They condone slavery as long as all slaves are owned by the government. And of course they don't call it slavery, but have nice fancy do-gooder language for it like the one to be found in the human rights charter. Not many regret that freedom was increased, no - that's indeed the right way to phrase how Germans tick.

The Declaration of Human Rights is a good example of the mystical residue you were talking about. The document basically says that every human being gets a country to live in, has a duty to serve this country but in return gets a list of benefits, the most ridiculous example being the right to holiday. I call them cattle rights, because for cattle they are perfect. Morality reversed quite a bit during the 20th century. Here in Germany, 80% approves of slavery: Ask them whether they think Cuba's health care system is acceptable or whether the draft is a good idea to keep a country united. They merely oppose *privately owned* slaves. They are not anti-slavery, they are anti-private-property.

Un-anarchian is an interesting choice of words. Do you know H.H.Hoppe? My knowledge about his ideas are a bit superficial, but I believe it goes like this: He calls himself an austrian-tradition anarcho-capitalist, but the way he interprets it is indeed not how most anarchists like to think about anarchy. He basically indulges idea of government power being a valid subject for a property title - and then all the usual arguments apply. And this isn't the wacky idea with private defence agencies competing on the same territory, he's talking proper government power. Viewed like that, the European monarchies had been anarcho-capitalist societies of free men that were overrun by a democratic mob. I've come to largely accept this view. And I love to call it anarchism. :-) Yes, I agree. Governments are typically embedded in a hierarchy, it's just that people normally focus on the national level. And the territory of the cities / counties are still separate - so I would argue it's the same thing in small. In fact I believe Hoppe especially mentions the Hanse cities as a good example of how independent city states can free themselves from the more collectivist mainland - and proposes a similar way forward for America. Not sure if that's realistic.

Here's my take. Governments are a tool to an end. The end is that of the men who are in control of the government. This can be a mob (democracy, always irrational), a subset of rational men (republic), a subset of irrational men (oligarchy) or a familiy dynasty (monarchy, irrational or rational), usually a mix thereof. (The definitions are just for the sake of this argument.) In the case of a republic I also demand that the influence on policy must be proportional to the taxation (or some similar form of financial stakeholder mechanism): Everything else would violate the rational self-interest of a participant. The man who can't pay taxes can not reasonably demand anything, the big corporation can not reasonably be demanded to pay taxes and having laws made which are potentially against their interest. In the case of rational men who are in control of the government, they have a self-interest in keeping taxes low: The government is indeed only their tool to maintain order, not to exploit - they know that if the government functions properly in the Randian sense, *their* lot will be improved. The taxes are still involuntary for everyone who's within the governments borders - but it is immoral only if the price is too high. And who's the judge of this? Reality: Monarchs and republics who tax to high will see a brain drain and be weakened.

My two cents on the actual topic of this thread. People learn differently. I'm pretty lazy in a way, I have difficulties to do what I've planned to do. Yet I came through my maths studies much better than most of my colleagues, who were often more diligent. And no, it's not intelligence (or not just intelligence anyway). There are often things that catch my interest, and then it's like there's nothing more pleasant than to investigate. For a few years, maths was like that for me. Most of the deepest insights didn't come by brooding over books but in situations like when one's standing at a bus stop. That's because maths isn't only calculating and proving, but integrating conceptual knowledge - which is something that can be done off-paper in memory. (Although it presupposes diligent memorization of the definitions beforehand.) But then I lose interest and then it seems to be impossible to deal with the matter. I would go as far as saying that it feels as if I had no choice in what I am able to concentrate on - yet in hindsight it often turned out to have been the right thing. In my experience, this is not how most people are (I actually believe there are probably biological differences at work, but that's another matter): I know plenty of people who never get really excited about anything but are capable of more consistent focus. And then there's a few who seem to experience their attention capabilities more like I do. And I see no correlation between this trait and intelligence. I don't want to value anything here, both "types" (there's probably more) have their advantages. I would just advise against self-blame if you're one type and compare your weaknesses against the strengths of the other.

I approve of your conceptual purity. The man who puts communality in a bucket with rape is the kind of man I trust to be reasonable.

You are right, we were wrong. Human beings are all selfish (in the crude sense that lizards are), but that's not the selfishness that leads to cooperation. And cooperation was the context.

I think we can agree that selfishness (I prefer to call it self-interest because it sounds more neutral ) is a drive, biologically hardwired in us humans. So the question is not whether we humas are selfish or not (we are, without exception) - the question is how the selfishness expresses itself. What an individual's self-interest is concerned with. It is there that one can find the many varieties. True, I merely wanted to stress that the coorperation doesn't requirere altruism, that's why I used the non-neutral word selfishness. Rand used that provocative language for the same reason I believe. I would not call a society "free" that kept slaves like ancient Greece. Women had very few rights there either. Well, here I disagree. The historic default used to be that virtually everyone is a slave to the tribe. Sometimes a few leaders had some freedom, and of course most didn't see the bars because they never aspired for anything others would want to take from them. The remarkable thing that happened in some cities of ancient greece was that for the first time, a majority of people took pride in their own ability and had political influence that rested on that ability (rather than a mystical or egalitarian notion). The ability in question was for the most part the capacity to buy arms (a financial issue) and to fight enemies in times of war (in Athen anyway). Women didn't have that ability, so it's logical they had few rights (or none even). The modern equivalent would be that only net tax payers have a right to vote (or something like that). It would take away any influence on the government from occupy wall street protesters (students), as well as teachers and professors (net-tax-receivers), who are also usually leftists. The word freedom is of course extremely ambiguous. I only mean freedom from the irrational - in that sense, freedom will be total. The world will be rational. Whether this is a good thing for oneself personally is a different story. I suppose it's best for the young, but those don't get what is played. It's not so good for the rest, that's why so many are so pessimistic about the future.