dgordon

I thought that was John Gatto halfway through the first sentence -- admittedly a long sentence.

It is a truth generally overlooked that gentle admonition can destroy ambition, enthusiasm, and dreams of a world better than this one more efficiently than whips and iron bars ever did.

Yes, yes you did do any such thing. Here's what you wrote:

"Objectivism is -- literally -- orthodox Marxism with different words filled into key blanks."

Then your link leads to:

"There are two classes of people in society. One class, which we call the ____, is productive and labors to bring forth all manner of useful things. The other class, which we call the ____, is not productive and, in fact, consists entirely [emphasis mine -dgordon] of parasites who suck the life's blood out of their fellow men. These parasites accomplish their goal via exploitation and alienation: unjustly separating others from the fruits of their labor, though they wrap themselves in a philosophy by which they seek to justify their theft. One day, the revolution will come and the productive class will rise up and throw off the yoke of the parasites.

Broadly speaking, one can insert "poor" into the first blank and "rich" into the second and obtain the works of Marx. Or one can insert "rich" into the first blank and "poor" into the second and obtain the works of Rand."

Anyway, let me address your current argument.

"The selfishness of, say, Galt is held up as great and good, the selfishness of people other than Rand's heroes is painted as a vast evil, such that their very lives are to be forfeit as punishment."

Rand uses selfishness in a very specific and unconventional sense, which includes "neither sacrificing oneself to others nor sacrificing others to oneself." The second one is considered selfish under the conventional definition. So if you're trying to claim that Galt's selfishness is the same as, say, Jim Taggart's selfishness, which you seem to be, that won't work because you're clearly conflating Rand's definition and the conventional one. (Was that new definition a good one for ease of understanding? Maybe not, but I'm not sure what word is available to convey the same meaning -- even "independence" or "self-reliance" don't quite get there.)

In your other argument, you seem to be referring to the train crash that collapsed the Taggart Tunnel, and specifically to the listing of the beliefs of the passengers in the train. Nothing there suggested they "can and should be killed...to expose corruption." First, the situation that led to the train being sent into the tunnel with an unsafe engine was much deeper and worse than corruption in railway management. More importantly, nothing in the book said or suggested they "can and should be killed" -- only that the ideas they practiced and preached helped to create the state of society in which they could die in the way they did. If you disagree with that claim, fine, but you're badly distorting that part of the book.

I don't trust that you've given this thought, because you're repeating standard criticisms which don't have much substance to them.

"Millions of other critics" was no strawman, for the simple reason that it wasn't an argument. Just my impression of the weakness of your argument.

Let me address it. You claim Objectivism claims all rich people are productive and all poor people are parasites. I claim it clearly doesn't. To prove my case I'll just cite a few names, which you, with your deep knowledge of Objectivism, ought to know: Jim Taggart and Lillian Rearden on one side; Mike Donnagan and Steven Mallory on the other. Even Howard Roark did quite a bit of manual labor, and presumably was never anything approaching rich within the pages of The Fountainhead.

As for who cleans the toilets in Galt's Gulch? Let's start with Quentin Daniels. Ever get that answer before?

Pain and damage are different.

Not even close. You sound like one of the millions of other critics whose reading of Ayn Rand consists of one Bob The Angry Flower comic. (This one: http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif )

You'll see the same kind of ratio for almost any forum or website that people sign up for. I've been on a number of forums on which the median number of posts is one, and they're pretty lively, so this statistic doesn't mean much to me.

Proven? Really? Who proved this? What were their methods?

Yeah, if I had been saying it out loud I would have been grabbing for words halfway through and would have realized it was a bit overwrought.

Yes there is. It's like the difference between going to Volgograd as a tourist today and going to Stalingrad as a member of the German army in the winter of 1942-43.

"Think about this: you IQ is defined and practically unchangeable by the time you are a young teenager, but your personality continues to develop for many more years after that. So there is no way your personality can affect whether you are smart or not."

I don't know whether the two claims you made are true (the one about IQ may be, the personality one probably is) but "there is no way your personality can affect whether you are smart or not" doesn't follow. It's possible that your personality may often continue to develop after your IQ is mostly set, but only in a highly restricted way dictated by what your personality was before. In fact this seems to me likely to be a common outcome.

I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago now -- I'm around 530 pages in, so I just read the part about the common criminals beating up and robbing the political prisoners. It undoubtedly helped the thieves a lot that the political prisoners wouldn't stand up for each other, but if for some reason one did stand up to a criminal, his friends would take revenge later. The criminals were effectively united; the political prisoners could not have been more divided.

It's a heavy book, both in weight (1800 pages) and ideas, but everyone should read it.

Actually, police have no duty to protect individuals. The Supreme Court and lower courts have ruled this repeatedly.

This reminds me of the book "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal" by Joel Salatin.

If Evans was really thrown out of AP classes over this, that's essentially an extrajudicial fine of thousands of dollars for some angry words, assuming she had a good chance to do well on the exams and thereby get college credit.

This is a rather common logical fallacy. It should have a name, but the "zeroes and ones fallacy" doesn't sound too good. A stream of bytes has a meaning which has to do with not only the bytes themselves but their context, and I can think of several ways in which copying a file from A to B could be among the worst crimes known to man. This fallacy ignores the context of the bytes.

Because it's unusual, and don't pretend you don't know this. It's already reasonably uncommon for any American to read books, and it's even rarer among Americans in their 20s and 30s, also known as the ages of NBA players. Classic novels and philosophy? Forget about it.

So these mostly foreign players stand out because they read.

It seemed to me he actually told people "Bill Gates may be a freaking genius, but he also worked harder than you've ever considered working, and took advantage of incredible, nearly unique, opportunities. That's what being a true outlier takes." How many high school kids were taking the bus to the conveniently located university computer lab in the middle of the night and programming all night in the early 1970s?

I tried this once -- it was very salty, which I don't mind, but it was nothing special as far as tenderness.

I can. Can anyone name all the others that weren't?

No, "lots of people" don't kill themselves with marathons. A few people who try to go from couch potato to marathon in 12 weeks or who chug ridiculous amounts of water over the course of a 5-hour walk-jog kill themselves with marathons. (It's possible to drink to the point of excessive dilution of the sodium in your bloodstream, which can kill you just like dehydration can, but this is basically impossible to induce below an Ironman triathlon distance if you're reasonable about water intake.) That's not "lots."

Distance running is what humans evolved to do, according to a good deal of evidence. Admittedly, running on asphalt and concrete with awful form created by a lifetime walking and running in awkwardly built shoes and sitting in chairs all day is not what humans evolved to do.

No they don't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_v._Kuhlmeier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick

I consider these decisions disgusting, wrong, and anathema to the Constitution, but there you are.

More people taking injustices personally, no matter how small, is a very good thing. It may be the only way to make a serious dent in them.

Did you actually say something, or just toss out a bunch of epithets that have nearly lost all meaning?

I'll address one: 120k/year is a long, long way from "ultra-rich."

So if people didn't buy stuff from these miserable countries the people there would be better off? Absolutely wrong. Typically their other choices are subsistence farming, prostitution, or selling children into same.

Also, I'm amazed that you tried to equate economic decisions to the acts of torture and mass murder committed by the Nazis. There ought to be a law about that sort of thing. ;-)

Somehow go always makes its way into online conversations about chess.

The Wikipedia article on computer go suggests that humans are better at calculating long sequences in go than in chess because the pieces in go stay where they are unless they're captured. This seems reasonable to me, though I'm no better than a beginner at go (I'm probably around the equivalent to an "amateur low dan" at chess, and can do what you suggested a go player of that level should be able to do in replaying and memorizing games.)

Also, it's not really fair to compare international titles in go, of which several are contested every year, to the world championship in chess, which is only contested every other year. A better comparison might be some of the major international tournaments like Wijk aan Zee, Linares...or perhaps this year's Nanjing Pearl Spring tournament, in which Carlsen decisively defeated a field consisting of five other top-20 players: Veselin Topalov (currently world #2, and the challenger for the world championship to be held later this year), Wang Yue (#9), Peter Leko (#12), Teimour Radjabov (#16), and Dmitry Jakovenko (#19). Carlsen scored 8/10 (six wins, four draws) -- no one else scored above 5.5/10.

Topalov hasn't become world champion. He'll have his shot this spring, I believe.

After poking around the site posted by wrs, I found:

http://www.element-collection.com/html/coffee_table.html

Forget books, here's an element coffee table!

Has this been going on long enough to have an effect? Also, is the kind of crazy made harder by the nascent fear of online exposure actually the kind of crazy referred to as "psychoticism" in the article? (Possibly. It does include "thrill-seeking" and "impulsiveness.")

I'm also not quite sure whether internet exposure will (or, indeed, has) made people more conformist, or more secretive, or perhaps even more tolerant (by provoking conversation about "open secrets" for instance.) Probably all three, to different extents in different people. Is the pressure against doing "crazy things," assuming it's even the relevant kind of crazy, significantly affecting the people who would otherwise have the best chance to become revolutionary scientists?

Of course, I meant "There is nothing so permanent..."

History indicates that running at a deficit did indeed become the new normal.

"There is nothing so normal as a temporary government program."