RobinReborn

Trump is going to lose and the world will be better off because of it. Some of his supporters will move on - and those who don't will be exchanging their rationality for whatever hopes and emotions Trump's lies, false promises and distortions had given them.

I saw the movie and think it's a pretty big stretch to say the hero was like Trump or the villain was like a member of BLM. This interpretation reminds me of when Rush Limbaugh said The Dark Knight Rises villian Bain was an attack on Mitt Romney's company.

Update, I've improved on this on my own. The first thing I did was write down some goals in the morning after breakfast. I evaluated how well I did in achieving them at the end of the day. I also started using www.rescuetime.com to track how I spend time on my computer which I also use to evaluate and find patterns in my behavior. I've also lowered my expectations. There have been a few times in my life when I've been very productive in a short period of time. When I tried to use those for inspiration it didn't work because most of the time I didn't get those sorts of results. I could easily get positive results from doing things like youtube or facebook and that didn't seem that different from spending a lot of time working without seeing results. But I've come to the realization that most time spent working doesn't lead to special results so I've come to value the act of just working without being distracted (and rescue time let's me know how much time I"ve been working).

I don't know how the Egyptians built those. Perhaps they were built in the off season and the employers guaranteed the workers food from silos in case of a bad harvest. But even if I had proof that they were built by slaves, that does not mean that they are monuments celebrating slavery. It's not like everything built using free people's labor is a monument to freedom. And I don't believe any of this Moses stuff... give me sources, though I will still probably be skeptical of the sources. Moses also allegedly killed the first borns of every Egyptian, why I would believe that claims he made were anything other than fake news?

Nazis are a threat to me personally because I speak out against them and can easily shatter their fragile egos. Thus they may be violent towards me. I am not going to suppress my anti-nazi feelings which makes me a potential target for them. Apparently three of them were arrested just today after a shooting: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/3-arrested-after-shooting-following-white-nationalist-speech/ar-AAtM2UJ I do not believe they are a threat to gaining political power in the short term future, but the historical record is clear, their political power grew exponentially (and now again in Germany a 'far right' party has gained representation in parliament... that's more of a threat as I see it) I do not see Nazis as fitting nicely within the right-left political paradigm. I do acknowledge that Naziism had many ideas in common with modern liberals, I don't see it as relevant. I acknowledge the racist history of the democratic party, but I don't think political parties distant history is that relevant. The Republicans had a Southern Strategy that employed racism... don't get me started on the horrible Ron Paul newsletters, they really upset me, especially since I agreed with Ron Paul on so much.

How to you ignore distractions when working towards achieving your goals?

regi... your original post is pretty cynical. I read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (by Stephen Covey, not Franklin Covey), I thought it was pretty good. Granted I wouldn't follow the advice literally but it is useful. Same with Branden's book. Not sure what you're trying to do here.

@Michael ESPN pulled a black woman for making a relative normal comment so it's hardly one sided. As for the 'Free Speech Rally', it was hardly about Free Speech.

That's one interpretation of the Sphinx and pyramids. But it's not the only one. There mere existence is a testament to the endurance of human creation.

I believe in moral codes and self-responsibility, but a lot of that goes away when you dedicate yourself to groups that do not respect individual rights. The Nazis are a gang, that's why they have their symbols and their hand gestures. The antifa are problematic, but they are against something that I am also against. I disagree with their tactics and I suspect many of them are socialists/communists. I do not see them as a threat to me, but Nazis are.

I'd say so, there are a few conditions for which.I would like a villain The villain should be confined to fiction S/he should be either: So incompetent that they are humorous or show the idiocy of their cause So tragic that they are almost a hero save for one flaw In a story whose authors morals are so backwards that they should be the hero. They have a redeeming trait which is better than the heroes (in many hollywood movies, Villians are meticulous planners and heroes are impulsive)

I've considered rereading it but I'm not sure it's worth my time. How relevant is it to the newly emerged segment of our particular instance of capitalism, the IT sector? A major difference between IT and other sectors is that once a digital product is created, reproducing it is trivial and essentially free. This is not true of the industries referred to in Atlas Shrugged.

I'm glad to see a healthy skepticism of IQ here. I've done well on IQ tests in the past. But I'm glad I didn't let that get to my head too much, here are some limitations of IQ tests: no measurement of creative abilities like writing, acting, music, art, etc limited to a particular language cultural bias (this may sound like BS but I've read that even on the allegedly bias free Ravven's matrix test based on visual patterns of symmetry, people who use the Arabic alphabet do worse than those who use the Latin alphabet... because many letters in Latin are reflections of on another but letters in Arabic are not) motivational issues (people who don't care about there scores will do worse than those who do... if you give IQ tests to black kids they might not be motivated to take them if they believe doing well on them will put them in a class where they will be the only black kid) no measurement of people skills they measure skills that people thought were relevant in the past, they don't attempt to predict which cognitive skills will be useful in the future.

Let me guess... you are younger than 30. When you're younger, your emotions are stronger and less reliable than when you are older.

It has been a while since I read ITOE but let me give this a shot. Here's my reference: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/entity.html Entities emerge from our perception of them, they exist between themselves and our senses. They are made of matter but slight changes in that matter can transform them into other entities.

This is more a proof that a believe in free will causes incoherent thinking than a proof of free will.

Here some information about a counter protester who was the victim of violence (near the police department) http://www.theroot.com/interview-20-year-old-deandre-harris-speaks-out-about-1797796038 Were any of the Nazis hurt? How can you equivocate between the two groups?

Also, the first programmer was a woman. The first person to write a compiler was a woman. Computer used to be an occupation mainly performed by women. Women used to have more representation in CS then they do now.

Also, while I'm a huge fan of science, I don't think it's immoral for a company to follow policies that contradicts science. Can you imagine what would happen if somebody at Exxon sent out a memo saying the company should change it's energy policies because of global warming? They'd be fired.

I agree that setting up a suggestions for improvement program and then firing somebody who shares something to it is bad (though obviously there are limits, Diversity is one of Google's core values), but I still think it was a poor decision for Damore to post it in a semi-public setting. Published may not have been the best choice of words, but the memo was sent to a large number of people at google. It doesn't take too much knowledge of current events to know that there was a high possibility of this memo offending somebody, and if you offend somebody you can lose your job. Most articles haven't mentioned it but this guy worked on Google Plus, which is a horrible product so it's not clear to me that he was just fired for writing this memo. He had shared his thoughts with other employees and didn't have any problems until he shared it with a wider forum. As I said, the problem was that he's publicly criticizing a department whose job it is to create policies, Google is public about its support of diversity. I don't think anybody expects Google to be perfectly gender balanced in the near future, but they're one of the world's biggest companies and likely to be around for decades if not centuries so it's not an unreasonable goal for them to have. I agree that people exaggerated the contents of the memo. I don't know anything about the secret diversity meetings he had to go to. But you need to work at fitting in socially at a company, usually this is harder for people who aren't white males than those who are. Have you looked at what the people at Google wrote against the memo? They cited science as well. As far as I know, there aren't many salient differences between men and women's cognitive abilities (Rand would agree with me here). There is a difference in their expressed interests, but that could change over time. Maybe women seek more work life balance then men because they believe that all the jobs where you work long hours are discriminatory towards women.

In this case it's natural for there to be violence in this case because Nazis are violent. There's a history of white racist terrorism https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/6tivk2/army_discharged_charlottesville_suspect_james_a/dlkzz2p/ And there's a history of antifas violently resisting them (I don't know too much about antifa, but so far as I can tell they haven't committed terrorism or murder). So violence is to be expected. I don't justify it in the same way I don't justify the damage a hurricane might cause. I think the Nazis should have to pay for security, the counterprotestors aren't the ones initiating the disruption.

I read the memo. I thought it was poorly written and while it does cite some science it doesn't offer a full survey of the relevant literature and seems motivated towards a specific conclusion. I think that publishing the memo was a bad idea and if he had instead had some conversations with the relevant people at Google he might have understand why google has the policies that it does and either been happy to continue to work at Google or left on better terms. By publishing the memo he is effectively attacking google's HR department. I'm sure that he also made a lot of women who work for google less productive, look into stereotype threat (it's important science that the author of the memo ignored). There is a huge problem of sexism in tech in general. It's in Google's interest to appear to be non-biased towards women so that they can hire the best women. Additionally, all of the science out there is confounded by societal sexism, as sexism decreases I'd expect all these gender differences he's cited to grow smaller.

I've been pretty bothered by this stuff. I do believe in free speech, but these people are literally waving symbols of two of the most significant threats to the USA within its history. Nazis killed Americans, so did the Confederacy. They have a right to speak, but if they assemble it's only natural to expect huge counterprotests and violence. Shouldn't they at least have to pay the additional costs that the police and community have to bear?

It is now, but it hasn't always been Surveys in the 1920's of mental‐test studies of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, such as Italians, Poles and Greeks, showed their average I.Q.'s to be in the 80's, occasionally in the 70's. Data on Jewish‐Americans were harder to find, because the early researchers, during the controversies over immigration laws, focused on nationality groups. However, the U. S. Army tests showed soldiers of Polish and Russian ancestry scoring consistently at or near the bottom of the list of European ethnic groups, and it was known then that half or more of the Polish and Russian immigrants were Jews http://www.nytimes.com/1977/03/27/archives/new-light-on-black-iq.html

@Marcus, China has adopted more freedoms in the past 20 years which has increased its superpower status. Still its population is about four times that of the US and historically it has been a superpower in the past so I don't see how you can take my comment as endorsing China. Still, you can't name a country which is closer to having an Objectivist philosophy than the USA. In the grand scheme of things Objectivism is a marginal philosophy which has never had much success in any country, but has been somewhat successfully practiced by some individuals.