Well... not to be an edgy cynical teenager about this, but she's doing this while launching a new lifestyle site where she'll be telling her followers (and the new ones gained from this) about living every day as the essential you through vegan beauty and body positivism.

Don't get me wrong - I definitely think that that's better than her previous message... I just have a strong suspicion that her new message will still to a large extent also consist of vacuous crap on the internet.

Legal positivism! F*CK YEAH!

Ayn Rand's Influence on Alan Greenspan
In The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan describes the influence that Ayn Rand had on his intellectual development.

Ayn Rand became a stabilizing force in my life. It hadn't taken long for us to have a meeting of the minds -- mostly my mind meeting hers -- and in the fifties and early sixties I became a regular at the weekly gatherings at her apartment. She was a wholly original thinker, sharply analytical, strong-willed, highly principled, and very insistent on rationality as the highest value. In that regard, our values were congruent -- we agreed on the importance of mathematics and intellectual rigor.

But she had gone far beyond that, thinking more broadly than I had ever dared. She was a devoted Aristotelian -- the central idea being that there exists an objective reality that is separate from consciousness and capable of being known. Thus she called her philosophy objectivism. And she applied key tenets of Aristotelian ethics -- namely, that individuals have innate nobility and that the highest duty of every individual is to flourish by realizing that potential. Exploring ideas with her was a remarkable course in logic and epistemology. I was able to keep up with her most of the time.

Rand's Collective became my first social circle outside the university and the economics profession. I engaged in the all-night debates and wrote spirited commentary for her newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte drawn to a whole new set of ideas. Like any new convert, I tended to frame the concepts in their starkest, simplest terms. Most everyone sees the simple outline of an idea before complexity and qualification set in. If we didn't, there would be nothing to qualify, nothing to learn. It was only as contradictions inherent in my new notions began to emerge that the fervor receded.

One contradiction I found particularly enlightening. According to objectivist precepts, taxation was immoral because it allowed for government appropriation of private property by force. Yet if taxation was wrong, how could you reliably finance the essential functions of government, including the protection of individuals' rights through police power? The Randian answer, that those who rationally saw the need for government would contribute voluntarily, was inadequate. People have free will; suppose they refused?

I still found the broader philosophy of unfettered market competition compelling, as I do to this day, but I reluctantly began to realize that if there were qualifications to my intellectual edifice, I couldn't argue that others should readily accept it. [...]

Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her. All of my work had been empirical and numbers-based, never values-oriented. I was a talented technician, but that was all. My logical positivism had discounted history and literature -- if you'd asked me whether Chaucer was worth reading, I'd have said, "Don't bother." Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think. This broadened my horizons far beyond the models of economics I'd learned. I began to study how societies form and how cultures behave, and to realize that economics and forecasting depend on such knowledge -- different cultures grow and create material wealth in profoundly different ways. All of this started for me with Ayn Rand. She introduced me to a vast realm from which I'd shut myself off.

From The Age of Turbulence, pp. 51-53. Omissions from the text are shown with bracketed ellipses. All other punctuation and spelling is from the original.

http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/turbulence.html

>> ^Fade:

Nothing in the laws of physics...except that you can't physically travel through time, yes.
Time is only this moment. There is no future or past to travel to.


Not according to some elements of General Relativity. Meaning, some would have it that the past, future and present have all already happened and just exist in a different dimension, call it the Z' axis. When Kurt Gödel wasn't destroying the foundations of logical positivism, he devised a time travel tabulation called the Gödel metric which allowed for curves in space time that one might be able to use some variant of what we all know as time travel. It is all theory, of course, and most of the theoretical methods for invoking time travel require a device of infinite size, or arranging matter in such a way as to destroy your time travel machine as it becomes a singularity...oops. Time is hardly understood really. We don't really know what it is when we talk about time, and by we, I mean everyone! Is time a particle, is it a matter or energy of sorts, is it conserved, how is it created if it is a substance of a sort? Is the apparent nature of moments of time in our minds indicative to "it's" nature, or just an arrangements of information in our mind...could some other mind have a very different idea of time? If so, how real is our notion of time, as it would appear that forward moving time would not be objectively real in that case. The debate on time travel, as far as I can see, isn't over...but mostly because we don't even know what time actually is! </rant of one of my favorite subjects!>

Time to go eat...

Edit (wanted to add that some hold that rats memorize events in reverse! What I mean is when they go through a maze, they remember coming out of the maze first, and going in last! AMAZINGLY DIFFERENT WORLD! As such, a rat has a much, much different idea of the "flow" of time as a forward flow of moments, his time jumps from now, to the then that was near to the then that was far and back to the "now" which will become another then that was near, then a then that was far...a jambalaya that we would have no idea how to make since of lineally, but it works so well for rats that they are one of natures most sucessfull pests.)

No one has the right to disobey a lawful order. You cannot have a rule of law that way. If it is an unlawful order, that is a different story. If you want to protest, you also have to be willing to take the heat, and to be civilly disobedient and risk arrest. What you're hoping for is to gain public support and enact some change in the mind of the public, which will hopefully led to a change in the system. That's the way it works. I don't buy that someones highfalutin ideals gives anyone the inherent right to defy the police. That's called anarchy. I feel the authorities here were not being entirely unfair, and did let them stay for a few days before asking them to leave. Why should people have the right to form impromptu tent cities and live in the public space for weeks on end? That's not a protest, that's called squatting.

I am speaking here of western style democracies. Totalitarian regimes are a different story. I believe God gives us certain inalliable rights, and if an authority is suppressing those rights, I believe we have right under God to transgress the earthly authority in those cases.

>> ^Kofi:
What you are saying is that if it is legal it is right. Legal positivism. If it is illegal then the police have the duty to respond with whatever power is within their means, not just what is appropriate.
Lets take that principle to its logical conclusion.
If the government says "You are not allowed to continue with the activity that you are doing. Therefore we are asserting our duty to protect the community at large and are going to forcefully prevent you from continuing in your unlawful act" Does this seem reasonable?
Google "Laws for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service"
This is the logical conclusion. What the protesters represent is a cause higher than that of the law. They are going about it in a peaceful manner with the minimal violation of laws and others rights (rights pertaining not to life, limb or property but of occupying public land. PUBLIC land).
If this is still unsatisfactory please ask why it is ok for police to do this and not ok for the lethal crackdowns we saw in Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Tunisia.
>> ^shinyblurry:
I'll preface this with the statement that I feel that police brutality is on the rise and unchecked power is never a good thing, however
This video is not shocking. What is shocking to me is that people seem to think they can defy the police and get away with it. They had no right to be there, and they were told to leave and refused to go. So therefore, the police had the right to use reasonable measures to force them to leave. Were some cops using more force than necessary here? Probably so, but the protesters made the conscious choice to resist which gives a police officer the right to use force at their discretion. If you are going to use civil disobedience as a protest, you should expect to be arrested. If you are going to openly defy the police, you should expect a response. In civil society there is a rule of law. I don't see why anyone is shocked at the police enforcing the law on people who are breaking it. It doesn't matter how peacefully they were protesting; their right to protest became null and void when they decided to refuse to obey a lawful order.

What you are saying is that if it is legal it is right. Legal positivism. If it is illegal then the police have the duty to respond with whatever power is within their means, not just what is appropriate.

Lets take that principle to its logical conclusion.

If the government says "You are not allowed to continue with the activity that you are doing. Therefore we are asserting our duty to protect the community at large and are going to forcefully prevent you from continuing in your unlawful act" Does this seem reasonable?

Google "Laws for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service"

This is the logical conclusion. What the protesters represent is a cause higher than that of the law. They are going about it in a peaceful manner with the minimal violation of laws and others rights (rights pertaining not to life, limb or property but of occupying public land. PUBLIC land).

If this is still unsatisfactory please ask why it is ok for police to do this and not ok for the lethal crackdowns we saw in Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Tunisia.

>> ^shinyblurry:

I'll preface this with the statement that I feel that police brutality is on the rise and unchecked power is never a good thing, however
This video is not shocking. What is shocking to me is that people seem to think they can defy the police and get away with it. They had no right to be there, and they were told to leave and refused to go. So therefore, the police had the right to use reasonable measures to force them to leave. Were some cops using more force than necessary here? Probably so, but the protesters made the conscious choice to resist which gives a police officer the right to use force at their discretion. If you are going to use civil disobedience as a protest, you should expect to be arrested. If you are going to openly defy the police, you should expect a response. In civil society there is a rule of law. I don't see why anyone is shocked at the police enforcing the law on people who are breaking it. It doesn't matter how peacefully they were protesting; their right to protest became null and void when they decided to refuse to obey a lawful order.

You don't have the right to defend yourself from a police officer enacting the law in a lawful manner, which they were doing. Legal positivism is a bitch. We derive our laws from a greater moral concern, apparently, but then the law trumps all other moral concern until a precedent is set in court or governments change it. In this case the government has non incentive to change it and judges cant rule retroactively so any changes, however unlikely, are only forward looking. If you fought back here you get in big shit and Victorian cops are like the LAPD of Australia.

I have friends who were both in this crowd at protesters and a friend in the Vic cops. Being in the police force gives you such an adversarial attitude towards those who stand against you. As such these cops have reduced capacity to differentiate between villains and champions. Funnily enough, the police had a minor strike (a form of protest) just 2 weeks ago. Oh the irony.

>> ^westy:
.lol what a retard he is now a christain lol so stupid moving from one thing bassed on no evidence to another thing thats bassed on no evidence what a fuckwit


And you have some epistemological view that is supported by pure logic and no assumption? Kant's Critique of Pure Reason pointed out the limitations of the empirical explanations of science, and Quine's Rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction destroyed logical positivism.

So far any philosophic or religious understanding lacks exhaustive explanation of everything. Every mode of truth has been struck down as incomplete or lacking in the necessity for it to make the claim that it is objective in nature. Surely the person in the video isn't a fuckwit.

Edit: Removing what could be interpreted as a slam. Thanks bluecliff

The supernatural is of course a definition which in itself destroys God if he is deemed supernatural.

Not really. Philosophers have been discussing this issue for thousands of years. As far as I know, the only major philosophical movement which categorically rejects the idea of the supernatural is logical positivism, which is no longer considered by most philosophers to be a sound system of thought.


I knew I was a shaky ground when saying people did it, not religion. My point was and still is, that religion can be a tool (for the higher-ups) to control and direct the populace (it follows from this argument that those that use the tool could be atheists in reality, and I think they might be). It may point them in better directions (see your own examples, denominations of Christianity) but it is still a tool for the people with direct access to GOD (priests) to tell those without what must be done. When people wholeheartedly believe in what a preacher spouts I am not angry with them, I'm angry with the preacher and the underlying ideas.

I've known several pastors, a couple of them quite well. (I'm not Christian, but the rest of my family is.) The thing to keep in mind is that these people really are sincere. Only once have I run into the kind of sociopathic control freak who intentionally uses religion as a tool of control.

Except for a few cases, pastors and other religious leaders really do believe what they teach. Which is how religion works as a form of control. The problems arise when doctrinal or structural problems cause condemnation of certain sectors of the world's population.

thats the infamous venomfangX, i can recognize that annoying bewsserwisser voice anywhere.

what he does, is alert his friends that he is posting a video, gets a little pile of positiver comments and ratings, then locks it before any spawn of satan gets a chance to respond