dgordon

Why am I not surprised? Thanks for mentioning that.

"I hate that most of the detractors of Atlas Shrugged misread the message."

You assume they read it at all.

Good point. On most other sites like this (such as Digg and Reddit) there's a third factor that's much more influential than the others there, but much less so here -- whether the post is funny.

You're right about A Confederacy of Dunces, but it seems to me that Ayn Rand wasn't exactly going for funny.

But I am, so -- uh-oh, I said "it seems to me." Better dodge that falling giant copy of Atlas Shrugged that's aimed for my head.

I was saying this in the summer of 2007, partly inspired by the fact that a Mr. Thompson (Fred) seemed to have a good chance of becoming a presidential candidate. It's interesting to see people and organizations repeating it around me now.

By the way, this guy needs to pull out his copy of the book, or at least the Cliff's Notes, on a few counts. Notably, the appropriation of Rearden Metal was hardly immediate.

Exactly. When the definition involves "I know it when I see it," there are going to be gray areas.

OK.

"Obama's father was Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya." --Wikipedia

Also: "The Luo (also called Jaluo and Joluo) are an ethnic group in Kenya, eastern Uganda, and northern Tanzania. They are part of a larger group of ethnolinguistically related Luo peoples who inhabit an area including southern Sudan, northern and eastern Uganda, western Kenya, and northern Tanzania."

So what's the problem? No "wikipedia sucks and is unreliable because I could say he's from Jerkwater, East Dakota," please.

Kenya was in Africa last I checked.

In my real life? It's more likely than you might think. ;-)

Growing all the way to the largest economy in the world is irrelevant? I don't follow. Nor did I say anything grew "thirteen times."

"There is no way we could have had the kind of growth we experienced post WWII if we had stayed on the gold or silver standard."

What's your evidence?

"The monetary system we use now is not perfect, it's just the best we have available."

Again, what's your evidence? Why is this system better than systems based on precious metals (the choice of most civilizations to use money) or systems that, while they use fiat currency, do not allow (in theory...) arbitrary creation of such currency?

"I feel very badly for those who have suffered unfairly, and this includes millions of innocents, but these things happen."

These things happen because the economic decisions of those who govern guarantee they will happen.

Neither Andrew Jackson nor anyone else had more than two terms as president except FDR, who took the US off the gold standard by stealing everyone's gold in 1933. (That's where the gold in Fort Knox came from.)

Besides, the US used a gold (and sometimes silver) standard most of the time before 1913, and in that time grew from thirteen largely agrarian colonies to the largest industrial economy in the world, so I can't understand why you say that "a big Ponzi scheme" is "really the only way to manage a monetary system so it allows for economic growth."

I don't see that "libertarian" entails "anarchist" or even "trolling message boards."

The Chinese middle class have it worse than the poor in America.

All right then -- fair to whom, and by what standard?

400 points is actually more like a 90:10 advantage, but that's a minor point.

I remember participating in that game -- I was in New York when Kasparov opened the game by playing 1. e4, I voted on a lot of the moves, posted my analysis (1350 USCF analysis, but still) to the forum there, and was greatly disappointed when the World realized it had blown a drawn endgame. This brings back the memories, and it was indeed a great game of chess.

"She lost her teaching credentials instead of 40 years in prison."

It stuns me that 40 years was even a possibility. And it makes me wonder: have there been cases like this that we've never heard of, with similar vengeful prosecutors and similar ignorant, bewildered, defendants, who now cry themselves to sleep every night over what happened to their life?

I wouldn't doubt it.

And yet the bastards in the prosecutor's office still ruined her life.

This isn't justice. This isn't even a miscarriage of justice. This is holding justice down, raping her, giving her two black eyes and a bloody nose, and then saying in court that the bitch was asking for it.

Eh, it wasn't that funny, mostly because it utterly misses the point. The Spudworks one was OK.

I used Jose Raul Capablanca, the third world chess champion. It wasn't even close.

So, by the standards of his time, nuts.

170 million murdered in genocides. Armenia, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Great Leap Forward. Rwanda. Littler, still stark things like Varosha. World wars.

In the 20th century alone.

Can the market match that?

Unfortunately not. What kind of boss lets their employees do that? :-P

"Pre-industrialism, essentially everyone was self-employed (if we want a specific example, lets take the USA 150 years ago, rather than regressing into feudalism or Egyptian slaves); despite the posited inability of non-elites to be entrepreneurs."

Exactly. The same is apparently (according to John Taylor Gatto, writing in The Underground History of American Education) true of the Amish today. Are the Amish just that gifted with genes for entrepreneurialism? I think not. It's merely conventional, and a recent convention at that, to work for a Faceless Big Company by default, as pg points out in his essay "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss."

I don't see why you equate rationality to a brute-force search of the possibility space.

"The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse. If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans share. To be human is to make ten thousand errors. No one in this world achieves perfection."

This seems almost to gesture toward a thought I've been tossing around my head lately. If you're basically a conventional person, with a conventional, average view of the world, conventional understanding of morality, and so forth, people who never knew you will look back at you from the future and ask, "How could you think such things? What was wrong with you?" We say it about people in the times when slavery was conventional, when segregation was conventional, when entrenched sexism was conventional, when Nazism was conventional. People will say it about conventions of our time as well, and, I must say, rightfully so.

The only way around this is to give serious and continual examination to the conventions of our time -- to quote John Taylor Gatto, "the great non-thought of received ideas." People of the future, with higher shoulders on which to stand, will probably still find places to criticize you. No one is perfect, and no one can escape entirely the influence of their time and place. But what shows one's commitment to the good is moving toward it -- which, in turn, helps others move toward it.

And the same applies to physics. Every physics major today knows about relativity. That does not make them better physicists than, say, Newton. That credit can only go to those who move conventions -- be they in moral philosophy, or physics, or medicine, or anything else -- not those who follow them, however advanced the conventions they inherit happen to be.

So instead of marriage, let's call it...butt-buddies.

Besides, why do you care so much whether Joe is married to a woman, a man, a genderless entity, or no one at all?

+1 for attempt at Office Space allusion, and the first paragraph as a whole. "Planted in the middle of sub/exurban parking lots" describes it well.

You know, you just proved their point about people who talk like Rand's villains. Is there anyone here who has read Rand's novels and can't imagine those words coming from James Taggart, Floyd Ferris, or Ellsworth Toohey? (Maybe not Ellsworth Toohey. He was more subtle.)

Or, you know, you could eat something that's actually in season when apples are several months out of season where you are. Strawberries would probably be a good bet. If nothing else, the variety is good for you and makes your diet more interesting.