Economic

Goodbye, moron! Edited just now by Michael Stuart Kelly Reason: Anonymous trolling. Nasty bullshit, basically.

It's called "Open Objectivism."

>>> You can't own a word. No, but depending on legal context, you can control how others use the word in print. Several famous legal cases involving that issue: DuPont invented a synthetic fiber it called "Nylon," which was supposed to be used in print by others as a proper noun, initial-capped, with a "Registered" or "Trade Mark" symbol after it ("R" or "TM" in a small, superscripted circle). Unfortunately for DuPont, everyone had been printing the word as a common noun — "nylon" — for decades, as well as using the word as a generic synonym for stockings ("I bought a pair of sheer nylons"). When DuPont tried to correct the situation, the judge threw the case out: "The public has been using the word 'nylon' as a generic, common noun for decades! Where were you 25 years ago to protect the proprietary name of your invention? Nowhere! Get out!" Lesson learned. Apparently, something similar occurred with "Kleenex" (now used as a generic "kleenex", often as a synonym for "tissue") and "Band-Aid" (often just seen as "band-aid", often used as a synonym for a disposable plastic bandage).

>>>a nurse who cares for him, and from her demeanor, I did not sense falseness. You didn't "sense" falseness based on her demeanor. In other words, falseness appears as a special kind of demeanor that one can "sense." OK >>> I know people are calling her a gold-digger and worse, but I didn't get those vibes. "Vibes" as a means of cognition? >>>She also turned down the marriage proposal 2 or 3 times before accepting it going from what Peikoff said. Maybe it was the offer of a quitclaim-deed to a $3.7M house that made proposal #3 the charm (quid pro quo: "You're 30-something and I'm 91. I've proposed to you twice before, so I'm gonna try it one more time: Marry me and I'll gift you a big house!" "Gee, I don't know . . . you said, a big house? . . . Oh, OK!"). That seems to be Kira's vibe. Kira's statement above is interesting but not sure how it will stand up in court next March. She claims dad's statements about her (on Facebook, I assume) are "libelous," comprising many "mistruths." One problem is libel laws acknowledge that statements intended as opinions, and not intended as facts, are not legally actionable. She'll have to prove he intended his statements as fact, which he could deny. Another problem is that it's a bit unclear the defamatory statements constituted actual "libel"; that is, they resulted in loss of income or loss of "consortium" (i.e., loss of friends, professional associates, etc.) to the plaintiff. Finally, libelous statements are not actionable if the defendant (Lenny) can prove his statements are factual; maybe dad can prove his daughter, in fact, is just greedy by wanting more of his estate than he has already bequeathed to her. Who knows? This IS ugly. But somehow fun to watch, too.

>>>I fear I may become impotent if I see too much of that guy. Talk about a soul-suck. The virtue of the pedantic mixed with the boring, peppered with random ticks of random emotions. Please. . . tell us how you really feel. >>> I am not too big on Popper. He's all right for propositions, and even then, I have some serious disagreements. For example, his notion of what a definition is. And other things. Too long for discussing here. Not completely sure what you have in mind here. Happy to discuss further on a new thread, if your time and interest permit. Regarding definitions: Don't recall everything he wrote about the subject, but I do recall a bit of what many Aristotelian-influenced Scholastics from the Middle Ages wrote about it, when attempting to organize and codify what remained of Aristotle's "crabbed lecture notes." Viz., A formal definition comprises two hierarchical categories; a genus, and a differentia. The differentia cannot be plural; it must be singular; i.e., it must be the ONE characteristic or property that makes something uniquely different from closely related things that coexist with it in the larger group known as the "genus." Thus, "rational" has served well as the single differentia demarcating the one essential difference between "man" and the larger, more inclusive genus of "animal." Sounds OK to me. But as the Scholastics point out, it suffices because we have a consciousness (an "inside") that allows us to make that assessment through direct introspection. So we can confidently state that the formal definition of "Man" is "Rational Animal" (differentia / genus). So far, so good. Formal definitions of geometric shapes are also possible: a "Triangle" is a "3-sided, closed 2-D shape." "3-sided" is the differentia; "closed 2-D shape" is the genus. "3-sidedness" is the one characteristic demarcating "triangle" from any other closed, 2-D shape included in the genus. But there's a problem when trying formally to define something like "dog," "cat," "stone," "cloud," "planet," etc., since we cannot ever confidently state that there's a single property or characteristic that makes a "puppy" uniquely different from a "non-puppy" (I seem to remember Popper uses the example of trying to define "puppy" while critiquing the Aristotelian idea of searching for an essential "puppiness" that acts as the single, logical differentia). The Scholastics claimed that what we really do logically when trying to define something like "dog" is to list all of the characteristics — **as far as we know, based on the state of our empirical knowledge** – of "dogs" as we continue to come across them, time and time again, one after the other. We might, I suppose, call these lists "informal definitions" as opposed to the "formal definitions" of "man," "triangle," et al., but they would've objected. According to them these are just more-or-less complete *Descriptions*, and the more we discover empirically about the thing called "dog," the fuller the description becomes, and the better we become at discerning any possible "borderline" instances of "dog" from "not-dog." I basically agree with that position. It's not unique to Popper but was the main position of the entire Scholastic school in the Middle Ages, which included, of course, St. Thomas, Peter Abelard, and many others. A fine restatement of the medieval Scholastic position can be found in the treatise on the subject by the 20th-century Scholastic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, titled "Petite Logique", loosely translated as "Minor Logic" (i.e., Deductive Logic). Finally, since science has, in fact, made progress since its start — more or less at the time of Galileo's "hypothesis-experiment" ideas regarding a scientific method of investigation — it's clear that scientific progress (including applied science in the form of technology), economic progress, and social progress), do not require "exact, precise, logical definitions" of their subject matters in terms of a logical genus cleaved by a single, logical differentia. Progress simply requires more inclusive descriptions of things, and the political freedom to investigate, inquire, criticize, and act on the results. Always interested in enlarging the discussion at some point, perhaps on a different thread. >>> It comes from a scientist at Ohio State University, Angus Fletcher. Don't know him, but sounds interesting and will investigate. However, I follow another scientist formerly at Ohio State University named Pierre-Marie Robitaille, a radiologist who originally specialized in MRI technology. Back in the 1990s, he began to think about the electromagnetic spectrum and the state of solar physics. At the time, it was thought that the sun was a "ball of gas" undergoing fusion. He pointed out a big problem with that model: hot gases do not emit continuous spectra. The sun's spectral emission is continuous; ergo, it cannot simply be a "ball of hot gas." He points out that the sun also cannot be simply a "ball of hot plasma," since the temperature of the sun's outer sphere is not hot enough to be a plasma. He hypothesizes, instead, that the sun is "liquid metallic hydrogen," a state of hydrogen originally theorized back in the 1930s, and which (I believe) has been experimentally achieved on a very small scale more recently. He's quite interesting, and many of the supportive comments on his videos seem to be from professional astronomers and physicists. Personally, I like the idea of the sun (and by implication, stars in general) as being a kind of "hot liquid." Must be the romantic in me. >>>It's his idea called Open Society. This has caused an enormous amount of mischief in the world after Soros put big bucks behind it. Could be wrong about this but my understanding is that back in the day, Soros attended some lectures by Popper at the London School of Economics and decided to name his own (obviously Deep State) foundation after Popper's 2-volume work on politics. Aside from that, I don't think Sir Karl had anything to do with Soros or his foundation. I'm not even sure they knew each other personally or met at any time.

Understood. But this might be one of those disagreements on degree you mentioned previously. I don't hanker after "certainty" since I don't think it exists outside of the narrow confines of mathematics and deductive logic. I find Karl Popper instructive on this. I am comfortable holding ideas about the value of individual freedom, reason, capitalism, etc., with the proverbial "light touch"; meaning, I'm ready to change my views *if* someone else can plausibly falsify them by presenting evidence to the contrary. So I find Popper's insights regarding "falsification" vs. "verification" enlightening, as well as freeing, since I think they encourage tolerance for other ideas without the constant imperative to do battle with them ("one must constantly judge" as Old Guard Objectivists would insist) in order to "defeat" them as being evil. As an object lesson in this: Whatever one might think about some of the kooks in today's "Libertarian Movement," it is a sobering fact that with its loose, "Big Umbrella" approach to acceptance of many ideas, as long as they are broadly supportive of individual freedom, it has grown tremendously since the 1980s, while the original "Objectivist Movement" (as many thought of it during the giddy days of NBI) has shrunk precipitously since AR's demise in 1982. The only nod of support in the direction of tolerance seems to be the appearance of Kelley's Atlas Society and its revealing schism with the orthodoxy of Peikoff's ARI.

Thanks, MSK! Truly appreciate that! By the way, have you seen any of this recent video of LP interviewed by James Valliant: At ~35:38 the current Mrs. Peikoff (Grace Davis) pops her head into frame and gives "El Jefe" a brief peck on the lips. Gold-digger? Nah. Nothing to see here, folks. Move right along . . . I was surprised by the frailty of LP's condition. At 91, his speech is slurred; he's missing several front teeth; and he's wearing an oxygen canula, probably attached to a portable O2-concentrator. Did he have a stroke sometime recently? I don't remember him having been a smoker. The last time I heard LP speak was in the early 1990s when he hosted a radio talk-show on a local SoCal station on the AM dial. At the time, he sounded exactly as I remembered from his live lectures 20 years earlier, with AR and her husband in the audience. But now . . .!

>"It’s as though in the process of going deep and going through it he had a sense it would be some kind of answer for… well everything" That's how Objectivism was presented to audience members at LennyP's lectures on philosophy in the 1970s. And when he read a written question on whether the mass adoption of Objectivism by intellectuals in the past would've saved mankind from the ills it suffered in the 20th century (world wars, genocides, hyperinflations, hippie movements, ugly art, etc., ad infinitum), Ayn Rand — sitting in the audience and holding hands with Frank O'Connor — loudly proclaimed "Yes!" while Lenny was still thinking how to answer the question. The audience found it charming, and laughed politely. It's been a while since I've listened to the taped lectures by Branden, but I seem to remember that Objectivism was presented in a similar manner: if not an actual, pre-digested answer to "big questions" about life, it was at least a reliable "framework" for coming up with the answers. It isn't. The infantile infighting of former inner-circle members — George Reisman, Edith Packer, Allan Blumenthal, Joan Mitchell Blumenthal, Robert Hessen, Bea Hessen, Robert Efron, Edith Efron, Murray Rothbard, David Kelley, not to mention Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, among others — most of whom were excommunicated for not being plumb-bob Objectivists — provides a classic object-lesson on how impractical Objectivism really is. Where the philosophy is generally correct (reason as a tool of acquiring knowledge; truth as correspondence with reality; private property as an important organizing institution for a productive, peaceful society, etc.) it merely overlaps many other past philosophies, or restates what was stated earlier. Where Objectivism attempts originality (e.g., induction is some sort of "big problem" needing to be solved; concepts as "units"), it's either vapid or incorrect. Finally, both before Rand died and after, Lenny often said that if only he had complete control over the curriculum of university philosophy departments, he could turn society around in a generation. In retrospect, the statement reeks of cult-like megalomania, along with an unrealistic appraisal of the importance of university philosophy departments. >"This is where I find my peace with seeing people’s fumbles foibles and bumbling. " That statement would naturally include Ayn Rand's fumbles, foibles, and bumbling, which includes at least some of her philosophy, if not actually large swathes of it. >"Philosophy is not a special science of any kind, as a foundation for knowledge it makes all the sciences possible: Brief digression: a strong case can be made for western religions as being the intellectual foundation for all the sciences; i.e., the purely religious sentiment that an omnipresent creator of the universe was rational, ergo, the universe is rationally organized, capable of being grasped by man's rational faculty. >The mistakes of its application and attempted projection of ramifications in a complex human world are understandable. Many ex-Objectivists would disagree that mistakes in their lives were caused by "mistakes in application" of an otherwise perfect philosophy. They would assert that mistakes were caused by a consistent application of the philosophy itself. In other words, it wasn't "pilot error" on their part; it was mechanical failure of the philosophy itself.

“I regard the spread of Objectivism through today’s culture as an intellectual movement – i.e. a trend among independent individuals who share the same ideas – but not as an organized movement. … Objectivism is not an organized movement and is not to be regarded as such by anyone. … I shall not establish or endorse any type of school or organization purporting to represent or be a spokesman for Objectivism. I shall repudiate and take appropriate action against any attempt to use my name or my philosophy, explicitly or implicitly, in connection with any project of that kind or any organization not authorized by me.” That didn't age well.

>>>Facts are your friends. They're obviously not your friends, since you've posted nothing but opinions and misinformation. Re pseudonym: you didn't complain for decades when Alisa Rosenbaum used one. Get over it.

>>>Think about it and maybe one day you will get it. In other words, "To those who agree with me, no explanation is needed; to those who disagree with me, none is possible." Got it. The fact is that so far as your summaries of articles are concerned, you're a fountainhead of misinformation. To paraphrase the great editor Moses Hadas: Your posts fill a much-needed gap.

>>>what it's like to be intersex (which is the mental precursor of a person transitioning to another sex) That isn't what the article said. The interviewee — someone named "Dalea" — said the following when asked by KP to define the term "intersex": "KP: Hi Dalea. Can you explain to Cosmo readers what it means to be 'intersex'? Dalea: Sure, intersex people are born with a mix of anatomical sex traits (chromosomes, reproductive organs, or genitals). Sometimes they are apparent at birth, sometimes they're discovered later in life. I have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). What is AIS? AIS manifests in different ways, yet the key factor is that during gestation, the unborn child develops a resistance to androgens (male hormones), which help build both males and females in the womb. AIS women are born with XY chromosomes, a female appearance, and internal gonads (they can be called testes). AIS variations go from being completely undetectable on the outside at birth, to visible variations on the genitals when the androgen insensitivity is partial. This means that on the outside, a body can look completely like a regular female on one side of the spectrum, to having noticeable traits of both on the other." * * * A bit different from "the mental precursor of a person transitioning to another sex."

>>>Trolling? Arbitrary assertion?

>>>Yet you are a one-issue poster So? I'm not going to post lots of comments on lots of issues just to make OL appear more active than it actually is. >>> with lots of innuendo and no facts. Check your premises. You arbitrarily asserted KP was a "successful" novelist based on zero objective facts and one subjective opinion: you liked 2 of her novels. So what. KP might be "successful" at writing novels; whether she's successful at selling them is an entirely different issue. I have no idea whether she is or not. Neither do you. In any case, I've never met KP; I've never read her novels; I've never seen her documentaries; ergo, I have no opinion about her one way or the other. All I know about this "one-issue" is what her 91-year-old daddy publicly accused her of on FB. I neither like KP nor dislike her, so it's clear you are the one with lots of innuendo, not I.

>>>Is Orthodox Objectivism a Religion? Psychotherapist Albert Ellis thought so. He even wrote a book about it in 1968: h t t p s : //www.amazon.com/Objectivism-Religion-Albert-Ellis/dp/B00104ENBM