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 | Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 11:36:27 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: David Arceneaux
E-mail: david(at)davidthemachine.org
URL: http://davidthemachine.org
I like that you tweaked your stylesheet. |
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| Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 12:05:18 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Francis Luong (Franco)
E-mail: dispensable(at)definefunk.com
URL: http://justaddrationality.blogspot.com/
Still loving the podcasts. Your discussion of Atlas Shrugged chapters 1-3 is incredibly detailed. I had to read it through once and listen to the audiobook through again to really pick up on some of the things that you discuss. I will pass it along to friends having trouble getting started reading Atlas Shrugged in the hopes that it will move things along.
-Francis |
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| Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 12:10:04 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Sajid
What happened to the "Recent Comments" feature? Is it somewhere else? I hope its not dead as I kind of liked it. |
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| Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 13:01:41 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Steve D'Ippolito
I too like the new setup... and the podcasts have their own home now! I have listened to a couple of them, eventually I will catch up. |
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| Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 13:42:45 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Sajid -- The link to "all recent comments" is still up in the top right corner of the page: http://www.dianahsieh.com/cgi-bin/blog/all.pl
(I did move around those links a bit, so perhaps that's why you didn't see it.)
Francis -- Thank you! |
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| Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 19:23:59 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: KPO'M
E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net
Is anyone else here willing to admit being a fan of an artist or group who is decidedly non-Objectivist, perhaps even anti-Objectivist (outside of family members or others with whom you may have a pre-existing personal relationship)? If so, how do you handle the cognitive dissonance? In my case, I like U2. Although many of the lyrics have a Christian element to them (particularly from the Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby), and Bono annoys me sometimes with his political activism, I like the group's musical style, and particularly The Edge's minimalist style with the electric guitar.
It's been a while since I've read the Romatic Manifesto (at least 10 years or so), so I don't recall all the details and need to brush up on them. If asked to defend my musical tastes, I think I'd analogize to Rand's admiration of Vermeer despite the subject matter of some of his paintings. Is this the right analogy, or am I missing something? |
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| Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 20:31:49 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Jeff Montgomery
E-mail: jamontgom(at)hotmail.com
URL: http://funwithgravity.blogspot.com/
KPO'M,
I like all kinds of art and music that is decidedly non-Objectivist, but I guess the question is: exactly how decidedly is "decidedly"?
My standard for art is if it gives me a new way of seeing the world, I usually enjoy it to some degree. I enjoy art from classical Greece through Dutch realism through Impressionism modern realism like Edward Hopper. If it's about "process" of making art or some bull like that, like abstract expressionism, I have no interest, and I have a track record of being a ruthless critic of it. I got called names in art school. Art has to have some relevance to the world. Vermeer is fine, but frankly there are plenty of better artists. Michelangelo, for one. The Baroque sculptor Bernini. Rubens, Raphael, Titian, etc. Then there are artists who are not as great, but are still enjoyable, and there are many, many of those.
With music, it's so emotional that for me at least there's a lot of leeway. I grew up listening to rock music, and just search for good stuff in rock/pop/alternative/folk/electronic on iTunes these days. Rock music is about kinetic energy most lot of the time, and not everyone gets it. But classical music, especially live, can be great. I think the point is that if you have a reason to feel something, fine. You don't have to be overly indulgent about it, but if you're happy, enjoy it, if you're not, sad music may let you get it out of your system. And sometimes, the music is just good enough that it just doesn't matter what the emotion is, it can make you feel it and it's amazing. That's good music. Politics has nothing to do with it, either. I'll give credit where credit is due, and criticism where it's due. |
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| Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 20:50:49 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Jeff Montgomery
E-mail: jamontgom(at)hotmail.com
URL: http://funwithgravity.blogspot.com/
I have a question, actually, that could not be more different that KPO'M's music/art topic!
Does anyone have any specific knowledge regarding ways companies may *legally, systematically, and/or intentionally* avoid binding contracts?
The reason I'm asking is that our economy is so mixed, that I would not put it past business lobbyists to try get laws passed where they can play loosey-goosey with contract law itself. I am not familiar enough with contract law to say either way. However, when I think of certain modern business situations, it seems that things are just very muddled and hard to understand for the consumer, and I wonder if there is reason to believe that this may actually be undermining contracts per se, and thereby free trade. After all, you can't truly "agree" to something unless the terms are clear.
A couple of examples:
* The ridiculously long contracts you are expected to agree to when signing up for, say, a cell phone or other services.
* Insurance, where there seems to be little objective definition of exactly what you get for your money. Medical insurance companies seem to be able to deny payment for all kinds of things based on judgement calls that do not seem to be spelled out contractually. I liken that to buying a pound of tomatoes at the grocery store and having them tell you at the checkout "Well, this and this and this is not really a tomato, so you don't get those. Only this pink rock here is really a tomato".
NOTE: I recoginze that a lot of the legalese that companies deal with is aimed at fulfilling stupid legal requirements. I am referring to whatever portion of contracts they actually have control over.
I realize this may be vague but I'm thinking it out as I go. |
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| Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 0:47:59 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Tim R
E-mail: timothy_s_robinson(at)yahoo.com.au
Hi KPO'M
I have a love of music. I have played instruments (in a fairly dedicated manner) since 4 years of age. I'm 29 now and although I have never attempted a full time profession in a musical field, I still practise drums and piano daily and compose almost daily. (I have done and still do a bit of teaching, quite a bit of performing, a little session work, accompaniment, occasional theory lessons, that type of thing).
Anyway, I suspect quite of lot of music I like may not agree with the ideal Objectivist sense of life - possibly (and maybe partially at least) because I only discovered Objectivism a few years ago and have been through depressing periods in my life. eg/ I like some sad and beautiful music, I like some violent, aggressive, angry music, I like some highly technical music that forces me to play maths games in my head. I tend towards minor keys (sad), modal scales and diminshed keys as opposed to major keys (happy). I like trying to be original and creative. I do love switching between major and minor keys when I compose - but this does not necessarily create a happier sound, it's actually often quite creepy (and dramatic to me at least).
Personally, I draw the line at music I find depressing. For me there is a big distinction between sad, reflecting or poignant compared to depressed, hopeless, morbid. I'm perhaps even a bit scared of that type of emotion which I identify as being defeatist. I like the fight in my character. I do have other dislikes. I find a lot of music to be mind numbingly repetative and irritating. And I find some experimental music which can be quite technically advanced to be highly off-putting - for some particular avant-garde/experimental yet technical type music it's as if I literally have zero emotional response, and that eventually leaves me feeling irritated in much the same way as an annoying pop song. I think part of the problem here is if an artist or band is attempting to be different or technical for the sake of it and not going about this with any logic (that is identifiable to a listener), or by ignoring harmony. I think harmonization is the vital, most important element to creating emotion.
Most music I listen to doesn't have lyrics or at least lyrics are not the main focus and are often broken up by long passages without lyrics (eg/ Romantic era classical concertos/symphonies/piano studies, jazz fusion, progressive and death metal, stuff like that), but in the cases where the music does have lyrics, far more often than not, these lyrics conflict with my beliefs. But I don't worry about any cognitive dissonance. I often sing the lyrics loudly, let myself feel the emotions, even though I'm quite well aware that I don't actually agree with the lyricists' particular opinion. And I don't really see any problem here. I'm certainly not worried that listening to a lefty or Christian lyricist will impact my views on philosophy or politics.
Having said that, occasionally I will hear a song and I will love and fully agree with one or two lines in the lyrics. (like discovering a favourite quote or some touching poetry) I'm almost certain that this will make me like the song more than I would have without those lyrics.
At any one point in time, I can't deny that I love what I love and I follow the music where it leads me. My musical tastes do evolve and change over time although I imagine this process will slow as I age. I'm not sure how related this change is to my character changing (I try to work on my character like any person should) although I think changes to a person's character that lead to chages in one's sense of life would definitely change musical preference. I think changing or evolving tastes could simply be because I try to cultivate an appreciation and interest in musical expression and techniques that are new and exciting to me. |
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| Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 1:32:09 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: William B.
E-mail: wbeaumo1(at)gmail.com
I want to comment on the whole "death panel" controversy, now that both Republicans and Democrats are accusing each other of supporting plans that will in effect require people to "die early", and especially now that Leonard Peikoff has apparently sided with the Republicans on this issue in his podcast (he said he agreed with what Sarah Palin said about Obama's plan, and that "death panels" were a logical consequence of socialized medicine).
I could see why those who are undecided on whether Obama's plan is a good thing would be puzzled by this controversy. Some might wonder, don't we want people to stop relying on government-funded health care if they're near the end of their life and they're costing tax payers a fortune for their medical bills? Some new students of Objectivism might realize that ultimately we want all people to stop relying on government-funded health care, but that's a long way away. They might wonder if encouraging the very elderly to get off it and consider alternatives would be a step in the right direction.
Of course, the problem is that Obama's plan would destroy private alternatives for those elderly who were cut off from government aid, and thus, even though an elderly person has no right to live off government care until they die, the government does not have the right to indirectly take away any alternative care. The problem is, these nuances and details aren't made clear to "moderates" if you just scream aboout "death panels" all the time. I'm not saying Peikoff did that, but he also didn't distance himself enough from Palin and other conservatives who can't make the crux of the matter crystal clear.
The ideological issue of getting people off government-subsidized health care altogether has become tangled up with the pragmatic issue of getting some of them off it so the government doesn't go bankrupt. Socialists who call themselves liberals now scream, "I thought you conservatives [read: capitalists] wanted this! You're the ones who wanted people to get off government care of any kind, now you've got your wish, partially!"
The "conservatives" should be screaming back, "Not like this! Not after you've destroyed private health care with your meddling!" But for better or worse, the "conservative" argument, after it's been torn apart by its enemies, amounts to, in the minds of the undecided: "Obama is going to kill your grandmother!" Don't blame the media or the left for distorting the argument, blame the argument itself that was shallow to begin with. I wish Peikoff, in expressing his views on this controversy, had explained where conservatives were going wrong, how they're not properly expressing the nuances of the issue.
So where am I going wrong? |
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| Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 5:39:56 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Anonymous
URL: http://lifehacker.com/5376669/remains-of-the-day-the-peripheral-that-rocks-the-cradle-edition
Simple Linux baby-rocker.
http://lifehacker.com/5376669/remains-of-the-day-the-peripheral-tha ... |
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| Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 18:52:29 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
KPO'M: I found myself thinking of your question after something came up in an entirely different discussion. A friend posted a link to a essay on Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign, one of the Vorkosigan novels that I've mentioned here previously, which turned out to be a reading of Bujold by an intelligent, reflective feminist who, in my judgment, got the whole thing all wrong. (The link is http://ltimmel.home.mindspring.com/campaign.html#enrique , if you're curious.)
What's wrong with her reading? She takes the novel to task because it shows women in a society where men and women are not equal, and where men treat women as valued possessions without purposes of their own, and it shows the women making various compromises to live their lives in that society . . . and not holding out for formal equality as individuals with the rights of rational beings. She does not take into account the established cultural context of Bujold's future world, which is that *one generation ago* women were completely subordinated to men and had no rights at all, but only duties, and that the change took place largely through the collision of Barrayar with one incredibly competent and determined woman. Nor does she recognize that Bujold is telling the story of that woman and that change.
You can present values, literarily, by portraying people who live by those values, in a society where everyone shares those values. Books of that sort are called utopias. And it's long been recognized that utopias in general are boring to read. Rand got away with one precisely because she limited it to two chapters in a book surrounded by dramatic conflicts, as a way of heightening the intensity of the conflict.
Conflict is what drives literature; values take on literary significance precisely because characters experience conflicts in pursuing their values. And Bujold's goal was not ethical perfection, but drama. In this novel, in particular, an important theme is the issue of precisely how you tell the difference between compromise on something negotiable and compromise on something fundamental . . . and how you find the strength to refuse to compromise on the essentials. And obviously you can't dramatize that unless you show characters actually choosing to make compromises, and struggling with themselves over whether they're the right ones.
And I think I'd say that what I look for in literature is not so much characters who are taking the right actions ethically. It's characters who value something strongly . . . and something that makes sense to me at some level . . . and who are pursuing what they value with unusual integrity and persistence, despite the difficulties they face. Bujold is good at that, and that's something I like about her. I like characters who have magnitude, and intensity, and a sense of distinctive individuality, or at least have some of those; and I like stories that stress test all of those qualities.
Nietzsche wrote, "I sought great men; I found only apes of their own ideals." What I like in literature is not characters who are embodiments of abstractions, but characters who are distinctive and compelling individuals. A different way of taking Rand's "the creation of an ideal man," perhaps. Or perhaps not: Howard Roark didn't design the same building over and over, but a new and different building to fit each new site and each new function. |
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| Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 19:01:01 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Sajid
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/opinion/08kristof.html?_r=1&p ...
Check out this article on healthcare from the New York times. Its a classical example of stealing an abstraction confusing social reality with Objective reality. Conservatives often argue (and rightly so) that if there is any system of Universal healthcare along with lines and rationing then congress should be subject to the exact same laws as the general population with no exception for being in power. This article seriously tries to advance the notion that since 15% of the nation do not have insurance then 15% of congress members should randomly have their insurance taken away.
However, some interesting points on money also from the article:
10-year cost of Bush tax cuts: 2.4 trillion dollars
Cost of Iraq and Afghanistan war: 1 trillion dollars
If there are 30 million insured, and we insure each for about 500 dollars a month or 6000 dollars a year, that is a 10 year cost of 1.8 trillion dollars or 180 billion dollars a year, also a little under 1.5% of GDP.
Somehow I sometimes feel that the wrong battle is being fought. It is not Universal Healthcare that will kill the nation, it is REGULATED healthcare. I am against government sponsored charity on principal but I do think charity is innocent and I personally wouldn't mind too much if the government spent 1.5% of GDP just to make sure the nation had coverage (with appropriate incentives tacked on so there is still a reason to get rich). However, REGULATED healthcare, where the government CONTROLS the system could be a total disaster on the order of North versus South Korea. It seems that the democrats are using (or misusing) the suffering of 30 million Americans to advance their own statist agenda and the opposition is taking the bait by arguing the fact that we just can't afford it. Then democrats try and argue that we can afford it and its like the issue of statism versus free market doesn't even exist anymore. |
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| Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 23:10:40 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Sajid,
I am certainly completely opposed to government redistribution of income to the poor, or for that matter to the rich or the people in between. But I also note that if you look at actual government budgets, the money that actually goes to poor people is a fairly small fraction. And an even smaller fraction of regulation works for the benefit of the poor; much more of it works for the benefit of large established businesses that can afford lobbyists, or large established unions for the same reason.
There's an old American political game, which is to announce that big businesses are shamelessly gouging the public/desperately ignoring the needs of the poor, and government must impose regulations for the public good; and then to enact regulations that enrich established business interests. We're seeing a replay of that now with health care, where the insurance companies, the hospitals, the doctors, the nurses, and the drug manufacturers, as organized groups, have signed onto "reform" . . . and why not, because it guarantees them an expansion of all their revenues? Now what's going on is, in the words of a crude old joke, "haggling over the price." The insurance industry is starting to object to mandates because . . . the penalties aren't high enough, and too many of the young and health will just pay them and wait to sign up till they get sick and need insurance. That's not principled defense of liberty; it's quarreling over the loot. |
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| Friday, October 9, 2009 at 4:09:20 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: Andrew Dalton
E-mail: andrew.s.dalton(at)gmail.com
URL: http://witchdoctorrepellent.blogspot.com
Sajid -
"Universal health care" is government-regulated health care. Whenever the government spends money, it always imposes systems to monitor outcomes, regulate methods, and control costs. It does not matter whether the distributor of government-funded benefits is the government itself, or nominally private entities.
Your analysis purports to show that the incremental cost of insuring 30 million people is something that we can afford. But we can't. The reason is that the huge and *existing* government scheme of Medicare is rocketing toward insolvency. |
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| Friday, October 9, 2009 at 11:16:02 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: Sajid
""Universal health care" is government-regulated health care. Whenever the government spends money, it always imposes systems to monitor outcomes, regulate methods, and control costs. It does not matter whether the distributor of government-funded benefits is the government itself, or nominally private entities."
No,there is a huge difference between making sure everyone has healthcare and running the healthcare system itself. Universal healthcare is more akin to income redistribution or just more taxes with some conditions added on. Regulated healthcare is the government saying "we can run the industry better than you can." Both are wrong but they are two very different ideas which will result in very different outcomes.
"But we can't. The reason is that the huge and *existing* government scheme of Medicare is rocketing toward insolvency."
And this is precisely my point. Medicare spending is about half of all government spending and the program is run entirely by the government on the pretext of social justice. But if social justice is the real issue here then apply income redistribution. Why takeover 50% of the industry? If I have to guess, Medicare is moving toward insolvency not because we can't afford it but because the government is running it. Just speculation though. |
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| Friday, October 9, 2009 at 12:22:08 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: Andrew Dalton
E-mail: andrew.s.dalton(at)gmail.com
URL: http://witchdoctorrepellent.blogspot.com
"No,there is a huge difference between making sure everyone has healthcare and running the healthcare system itself."
There is a difference in words, but not in reality. The reality is that governments control what they fund. The levers of power may be more hidden, and less direct, but they are definitely there.
"If I have to guess, Medicare is moving toward insolvency not because we can't afford it but because the government is running it."
Yes. But Medicare is nominally only a *funding* program for privately delivered health care, which by your argument, shouldn't amount to actual government control. Read Leonard Peikoff's essay "Medicine: The Death of a Profession" in _The Voice of Reason_ for the reality of what this funding does to private medical practice.
By the way, "social justice" is an illegitimate concept and shouldn't be granted *any* concessions in government policy. |
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