The Muslim Brotherhood has continued its crackdown on Christians and has now implemented a tax or Jizya for Christian Copts who do not agree to convert to Islam. Based on Koran 9:29, Christians are being told in Dalga that they must pay jizya or tribute to their Muslim overlords as described in the Koran.
The tribute varies from 200 to 500 Egyptian pounds per day. If families cannot pay, they are reportedly attacked and 40 families have now fled the village.
The same demand has been seen among Syrian rebels who reportedly have gave a shopkeeper three options: become Muslim; pay $70,000 as a tax on non-Muslims or be killed with his family. The same practice has been noted in Iraq with Islamic militants.
Jizya seems a wonderful example of how religion can be used for simple extortion, but the culprits claim the imprimatur of God. It is the same logic that allows the killing of Christians and burning of churches in a “moral outrage” over the showing of a disrespectful film or anti-Islamic cartoon.
I suspected that both of you (Gene & Chuck) would be pretty close to each other. After having reflected on the chart, and read up on the analysis on the charts for other people / politicians / nations etc I was surprised at some of these. The closest individual I saw was Nelson Mandela, then (a big surprise to me) François Hollande. And politically it was Irish Green Party.
I have heard many say that for example the difference between Mitt Romney & Barrack Obama was small but I didn’t really take it to heart until I saw the chart ranking of both of them. (They did come closer to gether in more recent charts) But it was clear most of the political types here in this country are far removed from where the three of us stand. Maybe Ralph Nader was the closest major candidate.
One characteristic I thought reflected my score was my underlying belief that I want gov’t to get out of our lives and leave us alone. The analogy I use is The Water Department Principle. That is, I want the water department to provide good, potable water 24/7 and to fix the mains if they leak. I want them to make sure the water supply is protected also. I am willing to pay a fair price for the water. I don’t want the water department to tell me how much water to use or how to make coffee or how long I should take a shower. I don’t want the water department spying on my emails because it’s none of their business and it has nothing to do with water. I also don’t want the water police kicking my door down. I don’t want water department commissioners thinking they are the elites of the town. And, I don’t want to have to deal with water department political drama.
Essentially it is I am a good citizen, leave me alone. A politician who comes to me and wants to tell me what to do, I am one to tell them where to go. It just amazes me how so many people actively submit to handing their lives over to the ruling class, sad in my view.
OS/Darren,
I scored -7.00, -5.24.
-8.75, -7.54 Who knew I was such a radical leftist? I even question my own authority.
Darren & Gene,
I took the test and was -6.38, -5.54. Interesting, because that’s rather close to where Gandhi fell on the grid. Wonder what the standard error of measurement is on that test? I could have responded to several questions differently depending on my mood at the time; e.g., how irritated I am with what I see and hear on the news. Ten years ago I would have been a bit higher on the authoritarian scale, but as I grow older the less I feel that way.
Gene:
I took that political charting test you mentioned above. Here’s the result:
Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -0.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.92
So nearly on the centerline for Left / Right and just a little below a third of the way from the centerline toward libertarian.
Interestingly, at least to me, when I took this test several years ago I was almost dead center in the middle of the graph. It’s probably the result of what I had to go through in the past few years 🙂
I think you meant “empathy”, Mike.
Typing on the Kindle again? 😉
Gene,
Yep. 🙂
Bron,
You can keep trying to rewrite history all you like, but Hitler was a right wing fascist who sold himself as a socialist when in fact he was nothing of the kind. But if you want to play the right/left dictator game, start with Robert Mugabe and work your way to Augusto Pinochet. That’s what you fail to understand (again): totalitarianism is a problem on a totally different axis in considering the political spectrum than the right/left divide. Neoconservatives and neoliberals both are in fact (despite the nomenclature) far right extremists ideologies; forms of neo-fascism if you will. All governments are control systems. That is why if you understand the political spectrum model beyond a simple single axis right/left dichotomy, you know one of the axes is control with “anarchy” at one pole and “totalitarianism” at the other. Either polar extreme is problematic, but neither polar extreme is the sole province of the right or the left. The political spectrum is best understood as a 2D vector space based on the Nolan model.
X=Economic Left/Right
Y=Social Libertarian/Authoritarian
There are 3D variations on the Nolan model that are even more detailed, but they go beyond the scope of this conversation. Needless to say, when you use both axes of the model instead of just one, you get a much more nuanced understanding of where a set of political and economic beliefs puts one on the political spectrum.
There’s an online test here that you can take to give you a rough idea where you fall on the spectrum. I fall in the lower left quadrant, fairly close but a little to the left of the middle of the quad.
However, this does not mitigate that any of the polar axial extremes are problematic in application. This is simply the nature of extremism. The laissez-faire “hands off” scenario endorsed by both hardcore Libertarians and Objectivists is just as unrealistic and problematic as the command economy of Communism or the highly authoritarian economy of a corporatists/fascist state.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: your (and Rand’s) understanding of political science is superficial at best and often wrong because the fundamental precepts of Objectivism are inherently flawed (society is real, selfishness is not a virtue, no one succeeds in a vacuum).
_________________
Mike,
I’ll buy that as an alternative diagnosis. Narcissism (especially malignant narcissism) and sociopathy are in many ways diagnostic “kissing cousins”.
Mike Spindell:
personal entitlement? She worked hard for everything she got out of life. And as a woman when women were supposed to sit home and tend to a family.
Maybe what you perceive as entitlement is really the “arrogance of excellence.” Or in other words feeling good about yourself for a superior accomplishment that took sustained effort over many years.
Bron,
She was a crazy vicious woman who preached a philosophy as malignant as Hitler’s. She also was a lousy novelist who attracted people who need to justify their own lack of apathy.
So then why did mankind really start moving forward once the industrial revolution and individual liberty take hold in the 18th and 19th centuries?
Gene H:
from you article above:
“His research suggests that players who routinely give money away as Dictators are also perfectly happy to steal money off other players in games that involve taking rather than giving.”
Yep, that is pretty much how it is with many politicians on the left and werent Hitler, Stalin and Mao socialist dictators? Why yes they were.
Whatever you need to justify being selfish, Bron.
As I said before, quoting scripture doesn’t make an argument and I’m too busy and too tired today to re-play “What Makes a Good Law, What Makes a Bad Law” with you.
I will point out, however, that
1) Metaphysics is a choice. Objectivism is a metaphysical system; a moral code. As such, it is inherently subjective.
2) As a technocrat and a person of reason, the only proven reliable epistemology is the scientific method. It’s not perfect, but it is better than anything else we as a species have tried and its error rate is far lower than metaphysics in addition to being self-correcting based upon new observations and data. In any form of epistemology, logic dictates that one should seek the system with the lowest error rate possible, ergo the scientific method is the perfect choice until something better comes along (it won’t, but that’s a wholly different argument).
3) Ethics as properly practiced is the use of objective standards to prove whether a given proposition is either good or bad. Being that Objectivism is a metaphysical system, it runs afoul of the the truths evidenced by objective ethical systems but especially when those systems are based in the scientific method.
4) The meme “selfishness is a virtue” is simply in conflict with the observations of science in that Rand pronounces altruism as evil. That’s where she runs aground. Science tells us that altruism is a reciprocal action that benefits self as much as others. It is a normally hardwired part of the brain, the posterior superior temporal cortex. Concurrently, the gene AVPR1a has been linked to the brain’s ability to process vasopressin – a hormone linked to the posterior superior temporal cortex and the altruistic response. They think that a lack of altruism isn’t related to the number of vasopressin receptors, but rather how they are distributed through the brain. As reported in Nature:
So whatever the driver of selfishness, bad ethics or bad genetics, the bottom line is that it is antisocial (e.g. abnormal) behavior. If one accepts that man is a social creature (which it is simply foolish and contrary to the evidence to argue otherwise) then any mutation that is antisocial is not beneficial to the species. Selfishness doesn’t help the species. It helps the individual, but in fact can be and usually is detrimental to the species as a whole as illustrated time and again by history. Dawkin’s idea about the “selfish gene” is often misunderstood by people trying to make a technocratic argument in favor of Objectivism. Our genes collectively do what is best for the species, not the individual. There is a reason sociopathic behavior is a not a dominant trait and that reason is natural selection. The real tragedy is that we as a species are in denial that our mechanisms of political and social control – necessary to maintain society – are also very attractive to sociopaths who in turn do a lot of damage to society. While I do agree that there should be no religious test for public office, I am 100% for mental health screenings to prevent sociopaths from attaining positions of public power. Let them stay in the realm of capitalism and out of public office.
Selfishness is not a virtue.
This becomes even more apparent when one considers that even in artificial systems like robot swarms, altruism evolves.
Kinda makes it obvious which one of us is fighting nature and which one isn’t.
Gene H:
My
“pseudo”-philosophy is just fine, thank you.I dont know how you could object to:
In regard to Metaphysics:
“Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute—and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? Are the things you see around you real—or are they only an illusion? Do they exist independent of any observer—or are they created by the observer? Are they the object or the subject of man’s consciousness? Are they what they are—or can they be changed by a mere act of your consciousness, such as a wish?
The nature of your actions—and of your ambition—will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. These answers are the province of metaphysics—the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being”—the basic branch of philosophy.”
“The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics. Metaphysics identifies the nature of the universe as a whole. It tells men what kind of world they live in, and whether there is a supernatural dimension beyond it. It tells men whether they live in a world of solid entities, natural laws, absolute facts, or in a world of illusory fragments, unpredictable miracles, and ceaseless flux. It tells men whether the things they perceive by their senses and mind form a comprehensible reality, with which they can deal, or some kind of unreal appearance, which leaves them staring and helpless.”
[I imagine you can guess where I come down.]
Epistemology:
“Epistemology is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge.”
“Since man is not omniscient or infallible, you have to discover what you can claim as knowledge and how to prove the validity of your conclusions. Does man acquire knowledge by a process of reason—or by sudden revelation from a supernatural power? Is reason a faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses—or is it fed by innate ideas, implanted in man’s mind before he was born? Is reason competent to perceive reality—or does man possess some other cognitive faculty which is superior to reason? Can man achieve certainty—or is he doomed to perpetual doubt? The extent of your self-confidence—and of your success—will be different, according to which set of answers you accept.”
“Man is neither infallible nor omniscient; if he were, a discipline such as epistemology—the theory of knowledge—would not be necessary nor possible: his knowledge would be automatic, unquestionable and total. But such is not man’s nature. Man is a being of volitional consciousness: beyond the level of percepts—a level inadequate to the cognitive requirements of his survival—man has to acquire knowledge by his own effort, which he may exercise or not, and by a process of reason, which he may apply correctly or not. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of his mental efficacy; he is capable of error, of evasion, of psychological distortion. He needs a method of cognition, which he himself has to discover: he must discover how to use his rational faculty, how to validate his conclusions, how to distinguish truth from falsehood, how to set the criteria of what he may accept as knowledge. Two questions are involved in his every conclusion, conviction, decision, choice or claim: What do I know?—and: How do I know it?”
Ethics:
“What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.
The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?
Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why?”
“The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.
Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil. Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.”
“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
“A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality.”
Thanks for providing an opportunity to show something of Metaphysics, Epistemology and Ethics.
Boiled down to its essence it means altruism is bad for human beings and rational self interest or greed, if you prefer, is good for all human beings. People pursuing their needs, wants and desires restrained by a rational ethics and code of morality leads to human well being. It is what our founding is based on: “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“davidm2575 1, September 13, 2013 at 6:36 pm
Gene H wrote: “Do your own homework.”
I did my homework and found out that you lied.”
So that’s how you don’t call someone a liar, is it?
It’s no wonder that you can’t tell that you’re lying to yourself.
Anything you might say about truthfulness is a waste of time.
As for Finnis? So what he teaches at Oxford. Doesn’t mean he isn’t committing the Moralistic Fallacy. It just means he’s not bright enough or self-aware enough to realize that’s what he’s doing. Logic has rules. He violated one of them. “Ought” is not “is”.
And Rand? I’ve said it before so I’ll say it again:
“I also hate to break this to you Bron, but my contention that Rand is a sociopath has nothing to do with progressivism and everything to do with science. [. . . ]
‘I just looked at the profiles for sociopaths and psychopaths, she doesn’t fit them at least based on her writings (I did not know her personally).’ [ed. note: quoting a commentator named “Roco”]
Then you should have read more about her the person is all I can tell you.
Here’s just one excerpt about her life:
“Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote ‘a scathing denunciation of childhood,’ headed with a quote from Pascal: ‘I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.’
But the Rosenbaums’ domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs—but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father’s pharmacy was seized ‘in the name of the people.’ For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde. In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her father tried to set up another business, but after it too was seized, he declared himself to be ‘on strike.’
The Rosenbaums knew their angry, outspoken daughter would not survive under the Bolsheviks for long, so they arranged to smuggle her out to their relatives in America. Just before her 21st birthday, she said goodbye to her country and her family for the last time. She was determined to live in the America she had seen in the silent movies—the America of skyscrapers and riches and freedom. She renamed herself Ayn Rand, a name she thought had the hardness and purity of a Hollywood starlet.
She headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories that expressed her philosophy—a body of thought she said was the polar opposite of communism. She announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen who are productive and ‘the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent’ who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. He is ‘mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned.’ It is evil to show kindness to these “lice”: The ‘only virtue’ is ‘selfishness.’
She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented ‘the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.’ She called him ‘a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,’ shimmering with ‘immense, explicit egotism.’ Rand had only one regret: ‘A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.’
It’s not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living (1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: ‘I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one’s right, one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them.’
She poured these beliefs into a series of deeply odd novels. She takes the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them with political ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on. All have the same core message: Anything that pleases the Superman’s ego is good; anything that blocks it is bad. In The Fountainhead, published in 1943, a heroic architect called Howard Roark designs a housing project for the poor—not out of compassion but because he wants to build something mighty. When his plans are slightly altered, he blows up the housing project, saying the purity of his vision has been contaminated by evil government bureaucrats. He orders the jury to acquit him, saying: ‘The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!’
For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand returned to a moment from her childhood. Just as her father once went on strike to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation—and said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil. The abandoned masses are described variously as ‘savages,’ ‘refuse,’ ‘inanimate objects,’ and ‘imitations of living beings,’ picking through rubbish. One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand makes it clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing in horror how they all supported the higher taxes that made the attack necessary.
Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don’t bow down before their manifest superiority.
As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as ‘imbecilic’ and “anti-life” by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: ‘There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy.’
Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: ‘I came to look on her as a killer of people.’ The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand’s claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.
In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas. She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult’s No. 2, and she named him as her “intellectual heir”—until he admitted he had fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman. As Burns explains, Rand’s philosophy ‘taught that sex was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human achievement.’ So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: ‘You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value?’” (http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/)
It corresponds to the other materials I have read. If you want to know more? Do your own homework. Now that you have some background and cannot feign ignorance . . .
I’m not a trained mental health provider but there are two who post here who agree with me (although one is off on vacation, I know his stance from previous conversations). Why do I think she was a sociopath?
The WHO ICD-10 criteria for sociopathy (which they call dissocial personality disorder) lists:
1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack of the capacity for empathy.
Rand? Check. To the core.
2. Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations.
Rand? Check. By her own admission she care nothing for social norms, rules and obligations.
3. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.
Rand? Check. See Buckley and stories of other persons who fell into her disfavor. It was always something “they” did.
4. Very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence.
Rand? Check on the low tolerance to frustration. See Buckley and stories of other persons who fell into her disfavor. She treated them like exiles and pariahs or browbeat them into submission.
5. Incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience, particularly punishment.
Rand? Check. She had no empathy, so I really doubt she felt much if any guilt about doing others wrong.
6. Markedly prone to blame others or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behavior bringing the subject into conflict.
Rand? Check. People don’t deserve love except for those who met her narrow criteria and it’s their fault.
7. Persistent irritability.
Rand? From what I’ve read and seen, she was an unpleasant b–ch, check.
So on the WHO ICD-10 criteria? Scoring a perfect seven out of seven, Ayn Rand was a sociopath.
Of the DSM-IV criteria for antisocial personality disorder (of which sociopathy is a subset), she only meets two and a halves of the seven criteria and three are required for diagnosis:
1. failure to conform to social norms and although the DSM requires manifestations of violence and/or arrest, it can be argued (successfully I think) she engaged in emotional violence as a proxy (see her treatment of those who fell into disfavor) – since this point is debatable, I’m calling this is a half until OS or Mike S. weigh in on this point.
2. irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults – again, it can be argued she engaged in emotional violence as a proxy – since this point is debatable, I’m calling this is a half until OS or Mike S. weigh in on this point.;
5. reckless disregard for safety of others – if they aren’t her ubermench, Ayn could give a damn about others as evidenced by her mischaracterization of altruism as evil and her hero worship of a serial killer for his inhuman personality traits;
7. lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another – her entire “philosophy” is built around a lack of empathy rationalized away as “rational (i.e. enlightened) self-interest”.
Since two halves make a whole, I’m saying she meets the DSM-IV criteria of three of the seven traits. This, combined with her stunning sweep of the WHO ICD-10 criteria?
I’m going to stand by the statement Ayn Rand was a sociopath. It may have been a result of post traumatic stress or simply her disposition, but either way? She was effectively a sociopath. I’ll also standing by the statement that her ‘philosophy’ appeals only to the selfish, narcissists, and other borderline disorders up to and including true full blown sociopaths. You’re all engaging in the religion of “me, Me, ME! and f–k everyone else”.
Rationalizations for selfishness and greed, no matter how they are clothed, are still just rationalizations. Which brings us to another feature of mental illnesses. Those suffering them often do not or cannot acknowledge that they have a problem and will rationalize things away or blame them on others.
Just like Rand and her followers.”
Ayn Rand was a crazy person.
And that last part? About “[t]hose suffering them often do not or cannot acknowledge that they have a problem and will rationalize things away or blame them on others”? It’s a phenomena known as anosognosia.
Like when someone chronically lies to themselves about themselves and goes to great lengths to not only do so but to convince others that they are right to do so – the combined effects of delusion and denial.
Sounds vaguely . . . appropriate.
“All men are created equal” is a legal maxim derived from the natural law tradition. As a legal proposition, it is a truism if you accept both democracy and egalitarianism – two core foundational principles of our government. Finnis ignores this to make an argument that is neither logically sound nor based in evidence. Homosexuals need emotional and economic stability no less than heterosexuals. Society benefits when they have it. Modern science tells us that homosexuals do not choose their condition. Indeed, some often go to desperate measures to the point of suicide to avoid or deny it. The real choice for society is between homosexual marriage – a valid proposition philosophically under the edicts of democracy and egalitarianism as well legally as a consequence of the 14th and 1st Amendments – and homosexual alienation.
No social or legal interest is served by choosing the latter. There is no legal argument for continuing such deliberate alienation under the Constitution. Finnis’ argument isn’t a legal argument nor is it based in science. It’s a personal philosophical proposition based on his projection of his personal subjective morality onto a subject governed external objective ethics.
You feel free to repeat yourself and your specious cherry picked reasons in your desperate and quite obvious quest to deny who you are, David, but the only person lying here is you to yourself.
That kind of cognitive dissonance usually leads to trouble.
Good luck.
_________________
Bron,
My epistemology is just fine. Sources and context matter. Your pseudo-philosophy could sure use some work though.
Gene,
Nothing further to be said on Rand Gene. My own assessment is that she suffered from narcissistic personality disorder that manifested her actions as sociopathy. However, despite the DSM’s efforts to define this behavior it comes down to a sense of personal entitlement, lack of empathy and an inability to relate to others that are not submissively to their needs. Rand by her own admissions about her perceptions of the world prove the case against her.
DavidM:
that was pretty good.
Gene isnt a bad guy, he just doesnt seem to understand his epistemology is built on quick sand.
Meh.
BTW, David, you get zero room to complain about an ad hominim response when you started off by calling someone a liar. In case you missed it, me and Bron have some fairly heated exchanges, but I didn’t call him a sociopath the other day until he called me a pimp and a prostitute first. That reciprocity, she is a harsh mistress. Speaking of lying, after you revealed that you are a “non-practicing homosexual” after months and months of arguing to essentially force your choice to oppress yourself on others by arguing against equal rights and equal protections under the law for homosexuals, I’m going to pretty much assume everything you say is bullshit and your cites dubious or completely cherry picked and/or misinterpreted.
Not that I didn’t have cause to think that already.
So next time you get the urge to call someone – anyone – a liar?
I suggest you look in a mirror real hard before you finish the sentence.
Then again, there is nothing quite so delicious as hypocrisy exposed.
Gene H wrote: “you get zero room to complain about an ad hominim [sic] response when you started off by calling someone a liar.”
Truly amazing how you can argue for comments not being ad hominem when they are true, yet here you cannot even recognize the difference between calling a statement a lie, pointing out that someone lied, and calling someone a liar. Perhaps I should not be surprised because you can’t even spell “ad hominem” correctly.
I never called you a liar or attacked your character. The term liar implies that the person lies repeatedly. I simply said that you lied when you called your opinion historical fact. My focus was clearly on your statement and not you. I was polite in first giving you an opportunity to realize you were mistaken and used a little hyperbole to call your opinion fact. I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I even encouraged you to give just one reference for your opinion, and that would suffice. Instead, you told me to do my homework. This tells me that you have no reference in mind. You prefer putting up smokescreens instead of engaging in intellectual conversation. Sorry, but I am not letting you get away with it. Just like I did not let you get away with claiming that 78% of Americans were pro-choice because of your misunderstanding of a CNN poll. I simply pointed out for everyone else that you lied about your opinion being historical fact. It is unfortunate that there are so many gullible people on this blog who are hypnotized by your diatribes. It seems prudent that someone should point out your mistakes, errors, and your devices of sophistry so that perhaps a few might realize the truth. You certainly never seem to admit to any error, no matter how politely they are pointed out to you.
Gene wrote: “I’m going to pretty much assume everything you say is bullshit and your cites dubious or completely cherry picked and/or misinterpreted. Not that I didn’t have cause to think that already.”
This statement by you highlights your error in whatever scholarship you might be deemed to have. You ASSUME everything without any investigation and research. You NEVER go to source materials. Your modus operandi is to assume and reason from bigotry, from stereotypes which you always want to push, reasoning constantly from the establishment propaganda.
I am certain this thread has gone into complete boorishness for everyone else as we have fallen into the trap that ad hominem argumentation always leads us — arguing about the messengers, expressing opinions about their character and methods, rather than arguing the truthfulness of the subject at hand. I have no interest in continuing along this vein. Go ahead and have the last word. I’m sure your comments will be full of hatred and disdain for me along with the courtesy denial that you hate me.
Copy that, OS.
Your idea of “academic” and “science” are not exactly the same as mine, and I suspect Gene’s.
OS wrote: “Your idea of “academic” and “science” are not exactly the same as mine, and I suspect Gene’s.”
You are right. As a published scientist in peer reviewed scientific journals, I expect to see a little data and mathematical analysis instead of rhetoric and sophistry or the “trust me I have a Juris Doctorate diploma on my wall” kind of attitude. My daughter also has a Juris Doctorate and is a member of the Florida Bar, but she would never flaunt her credentials in the shameful way that Gene does. My science colleagues likewise are more interested in the truth as shown by the data than the authority and credentials of the person speaking.
I have watched Gene express poor opinions of highly regarded scholars like Oxford professor John Finnis without a shred of logic or analysis for his opinion. Wikipedia says about John Finnis: “Finnis is one of the most prominent living legal philosophers. His work, Natural Law and Natural Rights, is regarded as one of the definitive works of natural law philosophy…,” yet Gene treats him like a second rate graduate student. Credentials only matter to Gene when they are his own, and his own credentials are not that impressive for an old man.
Ayn Rand outshines Gene’s commentary by a thousand miles, yet again, without any logical analysis, he just continues to deride her character and person, and he attempts to keep Bron from sharing her insightful viewpoints on this blog.
P Smith:
how long ago were the last crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, etc.? 500, 600 a thousnd years ago, right?
The things you are talking about happened within the span of a life.
There is a great deal of difference.
Darren,
Simple, but I’m thinking it would make an effective deterrent.
And what OS said.