KorbenDallas

Was going to post this link. Halfway down the page sits a bonus, a video of the Clinton's moronic daughter trying to piece together sentences after being asked a straightforward context question.

I got three chapters into Ominous Parallels before it hit the wall in a bloody splat. This sounds like an argument from authority, plain. Not so fast! It's not verecundiam to pass along information that someone said, it's verecundiam if you accept it without judgement, however. Not implying you did the latter.

Guessing mostly Trump, CC was the "tell it like it is" candidate for a while there, and loved the camera attention in the debates.

Art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson#/media/File:Lange-MigrantMother02.jpg

I want to start out by explicitly stating my position, which is I do not believe, and haven't found, Original Sin equivalents in Objectivism. Also, when carefully thinking through a response, I couldn't come up with one that couldn't be rebutted from many different angles. So with that said, here are my thoughts... Remember, we are talking about newborns. (So it might be a good idea--later if we continue this discussion--to review "The Comprachicos" and parts of ITOE to get her exceptions for babies to her general principles.) Take the first sentence above: "Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice." Now take out the rhetorical position of pointing the finger and blaming as evil, but keep in the mental concepts of evasion, subjectivism and intrinsicism, which are defined as evil in Objectivism, and apply them to a newborn. Look at life through his eyes. (I mean her, too, but I get irritated with this quirk of the English language, so I just use the traditional he that I learned. btw - Rand did, too. ) Everything he experiences is subjective and intrinsic. And he focuses on human faces that get close to him, not because he wants to. He can't not do it. btw - This has been proven time and again in controlled scientific studies. I see your formulation here, but I'm seeing an error of going up one hierarchical tree and trying to come down onto another. Peikoff has said in a lecture (I can't seem to find the exact reference, so this is a paraphrase) that philosophical concepts of subjectivism and intrinsicism cannot be applied to children because those concepts were formulated (inducted) off adult minds, that children largely lack the ability to form a philosophy. So the going up one tree would be inducting subjectivism and intrinsicism, which came from adults and can be said of adults, then attempting to go back down another, that to children, which really can't be done because they don't have adult minds. I'll agree that evasion and subjectivism and intrinsicism can be descriptively said of children (sometimes), but is that the process that's really going on? I think it's mostly just learning. Trying to organize the chaos as the essential. That a "something" A is actually A, predicating properly (10 categories), categorizations themselves, differentiation, opposite things, etc. I was having a hard time coming up with an example of a subjective or intrinsic action, but if a child gets something wrong I wouldn't call it that. If a child is arguing "their point", many times its that the child is seeking their identity, and wanting to make their case as a matter of independence. I still wouldn't call that subjectivism or intrinsicism. If they evade, I don't know if I would call it evasion, as such, as again it likely is a matter of the child wanting their own identity, to think for themselves. (These are my own cases I came up with.. no straw man MSK. ) In the case of the infant, I would say that everything he experiences is objective. He is a new animal experiencing reality on a concrete-perceptual level. However, he's not tabula rasa. The experiment of having the baby crawl over plexiglass comes to mind here, that underneath the plexiglass is what looks like to be a ledge, and the baby stops crawling out of self preservation. But I wouldn't call that evasion (the philosophical usage). It's a hard wired response, inaction, to preserve his entity, to stay alive. I wouldn't call his light or sound sensitivity evasions, either, those are built-in protection mechanisms to help keep him alive. The random focusing of faces, smiles, coos, cries, etc. might descriptively be whims, but really I would say it is a new animal learning sense-perception (consciousness) to the world around him (existence). I don't think it was Rand's intention to classify infants or children as evil, nor do I believe she did (explained above). I'm seeing the human infant, and as other mammal animal infants, having built-in survival mechanisms. I wouldn't call it volition or value, either, is much less glamorous than that. It's really just a new animal that built in survival mechanisms as a given, just as it has fingers or toes, or a digestive system, a cardiovascular system, a CNS, etc. It's just a fact, that it exists as an attribute. Don't have much to say on this, wanted to quote it as a +1 to Rand and her enormous achievements and contributions, and the fact you named two boys after characters in her novels.

Kind of hoping to get the nice mobile interface back

You're complaining that your friends "answer to nearly every question anyone asks is simply a link to an Ayn Rand quotation on the subject", yet at the end of your post you're asking "what would Rand would say about this?" Not sure if you realized you did this. Anyway, Rand would want you to do your own inductions and (she'd say) if you did it objectively you'd end up with Objectivism. Knowledge really isn't knowledge until an individual connects to something, integrates it (redowned to reality), so by quipping Rand quotes it doesn't necessarily indicate a person has or hasn't performed the mental work required. The inference I'm making here is someone can definitely float some, or much, of Objectivism as a deductive system without redowning it properly, or perhaps redowning it some. It might be indicative that someone quipping Rand quotes might be floating it in this way.

Trump 30 Cruz 17 Rubio 14 Bush 9 .. then the rest of the field

Jeb Bush is surging in polls, and Trump is going after him on twitter.. and his sons on Fox:

The idea of original sin can set someone on a malevolent universe premise very fast. I'm sure you guys are aware of Rand's explicit rejection of the idea of original sin, and the various forms it takes: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/original_sin.html To chew on this a bit more, original sin would be considered an anti-concept in Objectivism, and the concept it would take out is the concept of man, that man is doomed to fail by his nature, rather than efficate.

Those two are a reversal of causation. "I am, therefore I can eat," is the correction, etc. There are entities that exist and do not eat or excrete or think. Existence as such does not imply any particular property. On the other hand to say I am a thinking being therefore I think is a mere tautology. The statement, "I am, therefore I can eat," is an Aristotelian predication of a potentiality. The subject of the sentence indicates the first of the 10 categories, that a thing exists, its primary substance. The predication is the potentiality (an action) of the entity. Neither "I eat, therefore I am," or "I am, therefore I can eat," offer any proof to Objectivism's philosophical axioms. (Which, axioms aren't proven, they are.)

Roger, You mean this? The Interwebs is afire with people talking about how Trump stood up to the audience. They're saying he's the only one who has the balls to do it like that. So I don't know where you saw shaming. I didn't see any. I saw peer pressure attempted, but it didn't go anywhere. Not with Trump. Not with the public at large. Maybe us Trumpers are just shameless. Michael What struck me is after Tump "shushed" Bush--Bush obeyed! WRONG thing to do in a situation like that. RIGHT thing to do if you want appear weak. I want to like Bush. He did a good job as governor in Florida, but in situations like this he's showing he has no backbone. And employing his mommy to campaign for him? boo

This doesn't look good for Robo Rubio.

If it helps, Objectivism holds that the phrase, "that all men are created equal," means men are born with certain inaliable rights--rights that are specific to the nature of man, ie. his survival, but it doesn't say that all men end up equal.

MSK, have you seen the god helmet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

Korben Dallas multipass! "Yeah I know, it's a multipass...." Sorry, had to say it lol One of our all time favorite movies! Greg Definitely OT to the thread, but:

Objectivism recognizes that humans are fallible--not as an inherent fault, as religious doctrines might convey, but are fallible sometimes. Peikoff says most of the time it is due to going out of focus, not having knowledge, or a misjudgment. Objectivism's view on moral perfection is not the christian view of perfection in christ's image, an individual must realize his context--the options available to him, his capacities, his potentialities--and be a moral warrior for himself first, as he can realize his potential, in his lifetime, and on Earth. Peikoff also mentioned the Objectivist truck driver in a lecture. He said that if that is all the intellectual abilities that that person would have, then that's what they are, yet he can strive to be a moral person, and if he accomplishes that, then it would be quite an achievement because most people cannot, and do not. Peikoff then spoke at one point about his own potentialities--he said that he wasn't the genius, that Ayn Rand was. Then Ayn Rand, after Atlas Shrugged was published, "..fell into a deep depression and chided herself for not being more like her ideal man. 'John Galt wouldn’t feel this,' she wrote. 'He would know how to handle this. I don’t know.'" (ref. http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/60120/index1.html ) So even Ayn Rand, a champion spirit as there ever was, who Binswanger considers a "once in a millennium genius" (ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Binswanger#cite_note-McConnellScott-2), had looked at her own character and chided herself. I'm also reminded here of Aristotle's not-thing. A person is the not-thing before he is the thing. (Physics I.7) "A man who was unmusical becomes musical." "Some bronze (which was shapeless) becomes a statue." Ayn, was not the Ayn we know before she became the Ayn we know. Galt, was not-Galt before he became Galt. and to quote MSK, above:

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours." -Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Peikoff speaks against the Golden Rule in his Introduction to Logic course, as a logical fallacy of the Misuse of the Mean. He talks about sliding standards inherent in that kind of thinking, and provides other reasons as well. Lionel Ruby also touches on this in his Logic an Introduction book.

Mark Cuban, who I like to think is an Objectivist fundamentally, as he has a yacht named The Fountainhead named after Rand's novel, talks about how he hates Cruz and likes the Donald: Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Saw this from Drudge.. "To god be the glory!" ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos

haha, hate the fact that Trump didn't place ahead of Cruz, but this video makes up for it

Trump 27, Rubio 19, Cruz 17, Paul 10, Bush 7

Found a response by Cruz and his campaign (the video is off topic, the text is on topic with the story headline): http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/31/cruz-campaign-criticized-over-mailers-sent-to-potential-iowa-voters.html?intcmp=hpbt1

So far I haven't seen an apology mentioned.. MSNBC is covering this, too, 3:32 in: