I'm an Objectivist. Debate me.

Discussion in 'Religion & Philosophy' started by Appleo, Sep 3, 2018.

  1. Questerr

    Questerr Banned

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    We are talking about public property in the form of those resources that cannot be divided into private ownership.
     
  2. Questerr

    Questerr Banned

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    And then, if you can’t afford to pay, you just get to sit and watch while your house burns down.
     
  3. Aphotic

    Aphotic Banned

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    Ayn Rand was a novelist. Your belief system is a fraud and a fiction, literally.

    To be fair, I want to address a specific facet of your ideology that has massive, gaping holes; the "nobility of selfishness." The entire premise is a fraud. It goes against human evolutionary history; it goes against tribalism and it goes against our social structure. The endless selfishness endorsed in Rand's world would result in societal collapse. Society as a whole is against the notion of Rand's ideology.

    Capitalism also flies in the face of literally millions of years of genetic imprinting. These things are not simply undone because of a work of fiction. Rand's philosophical meanderings through the fountainhead and atlas shrugged are preposterously the foundation for the modern conservative movement, which denies millions of years of genetic code.

    Human beings have for the vast majority of their existence lived in tribes, of which all people were very similar, in both appearance, standing, and belief; they relied on each other for survival. This flies in the face of Rand's nonsensical approach to ethics. The endorsement of capitalism alone flies in the face of scientific fact, especially for a belief system that claims "reason" as one of its tenets.

    Randian philosophy is like applying the Jedi Code to an entire political spectrum. It's a work of fiction.
     
  4. Aphotic

    Aphotic Banned

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    There are plenty of things, like Islam, that claim to be the final revelation, the final truth.

    As for disliking skeptics, well, color me unimpressed with your explanation. What I dislike about ideologues is that they cannot think outside the preconstructed box they live in. For example, you -presume- your stance is correct, and cannot fathom how someone else would possibly disagree with you, and you dislike them when they do so.

    Not only is it childish, its presumptuous.

    I am a skeptic of any system that claims, or the follows of which claim, that their ideology is the truth, the only truth, or the truth, in any capacity. The reason I will disagree with you is that we have literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of years of evidence that disproves the Randian assertions made in objectivism.

    Doubling down means instead of addressing counter points, you simply re-state the original point as if any counter to it did not exist.

    Here's something old; not new, but maybe new to you. Human kind has -never- existed in a Randian Objectivist world because it is -fiction.- Human beings have lived the vast majority of our species history in tribal groups of like minded and appearanced individuals that rely on each other for our very existence. Randian Objectivism ignores that genealogical history and presumes to replace it with a self centered, id based ideology of selfishness that flies directly in the face of the monumental strength of DNA imprinting.

    Your ideology, that of objectivism, claims to stand for reason, however, it flies in the face of it.
     
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  5. Aphotic

    Aphotic Banned

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    Again with the unethical display of Objectivism. **** the guy's house that is burning down - we only need the FD to go and spray flame retardant on the neighbors house because they didn't have the audacity to have a house fire.

    Social Security is not a welfare program. It is an earned benefit.

    You clearly are misguided in plenty of your assertions here. Hence the childish label objectivists and libertarians receive and duly earn.
     
  6. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    My own x,y,z system (as you call it) goes something like this:

    1 - do you agree to view and state both sides of the issue?

    2 - do you agree to isolate opinion and hear-say from facts?

    3 - can you agree to disagree?

    4 - are you capable of logic and rational thinking?

    They then must follow all those parameters as we discuss philosophy, politics, issues, and so forth.

    Religion is strictly out of the question.
     
  7. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    It gets tricky though when big states like California and New York try to hold the rest of the Nation hostage to their own socialist/communist views.

    That's why the Founding Freemasons establish a system of checks and balances on the power of the big states as well. This gives the smaller states more say in matters such as POTUS elections and Federal law.
     
  8. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    Move to Canada or Mexico then.

    You can also try Australia or England or Scotland too.
     
  9. Questerr

    Questerr Banned

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    What’s the difference between someone’s house burning down and someone dying from a treatable illness or injury?
     
  10. Questerr

    Questerr Banned

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    How is paying for free loaders on the system not Altruism?
     
  11. Ritter

    Ritter Well-Known Member

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    Who is the modern day, real life Elseworth Toohey?
     
  12. One Mind

    One Mind Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    And given not all humans have the IQs high enough to do that, what is your solution? Given that this is our actual reality. We have always had lower IQ people who were not mentally capable of high skills. In the past, we had something, enough work, for these people to do, and their numbers are perhaps greater than you know.

    What is high skilled today? What was once a high skilled job in many cases is no longer a high skilled job, thanks to advancing technology.
     
  13. Questerr

    Questerr Banned

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    Objectivists love to handwave stuff like this and say “oh it will just work out”, or otherwise they go down the route I’ve seen from Anarcho-Capitalists who basically say “Well then those surplus laborers will just starve to death or turn to crime as a means of survival and end up as slaves in private prisons or killed by for-profit police.”
     
  14. One Mind

    One Mind Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I was entitled to the money that my employees in my business earned for me, given they were doing the actual work.

    But I would be acceptable of me not being entitled to the money earned by the labor of others. But that is not how capitalism works. I could literally sit on my arse, in an air conditioned office, flirting with my new, young, pretty secretary, as scores of men sweated it out in my small factory, earning my non laboring arse great sums of money. These employees were actually supporting me, enriching me, by doing the actual work, adding value to manufactured goods. My work only involved talking on the phone, sometimes meeting for lunch to sell new customers. I never worked up a sweat nor was worn out at the end of the day. But if not for their labor, I would have been doing what they did for me, and not depending upon their labor to enrich me.

    It really is a matter of perspective, right? Your perspective appeals to you, for perhaps more than simple intellectual reasons? And quite a bit of immorality involved as well. And entitlement.
     
  15. One Mind

    One Mind Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I saw Rand as an immoral idealist. As well as her philosophy which was a reaction to her earlier life. Reactionaries are seldom sane. But affected.

    I would not want to live in her perfect world. Nor more than I would want to live in Stalin's perfect world.
     
  16. Questerr

    Questerr Banned

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    An Objectivist world would end up turning into Jennifer Government, not Galt’s Gulch.
     
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  17. Appleo

    Appleo Newly Registered

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    Uhh... yes, it's acceptable if no one if forced to give up their money when they don't want to. The individual comes first, not the collective.
     
  18. Appleo

    Appleo Newly Registered

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    To change society, I think changing it step-by-step is great.
     
  19. Appleo

    Appleo Newly Registered

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    So you'd rather have man ruled by their evolutionary biology instead of him using his mind to reach greater heights?

    I think accepting that man is tribal, and that his only purpose is to live for the tribe makes him, as Rand put it, "a sacrificial animal."
     
  20. Aphotic

    Aphotic Banned

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    Sorry, I don't accept Rand's commentary as argument because I find her prose terrible, her premise untenable and her ideology self defeating.

    I bring up evolutionary biology to show you how Rand's philosophy is grounded in nothing but conjecture and wish listing. We evolve but evolution is a slow and not well tamed beast; thus, it would be generation upon generation of suffering to install Rand's hideously unethical premise on the public at large, and would probably result in the destruction of our species at large, generally because we as a species are not wired to work the way Rand insists.
     
  21. Aphotic

    Aphotic Banned

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    You're wrong. What if, as individuals, every individual chose to abstain from reproduction? This is a possible, if highly unlikely, outcome of randian endorsement of the selfish self.

    The collective is composed of individuals and the general issue at hand with Rand and the right wing in general is applying an economic principal to non-economic issues, like reproduction and care for the elderly.

    Society at large is a collective. It is composed of individuals. Those individuals are compelled to care for the society -precisely- because selfishness is not a noble cause. This compelling comes from taxation.

    As a citizen of this society, do you drive on paved roads? How about your water, is it purified by the city? What about health care?

    You tell me how your "Objectivist" life is going and I can point you toward literally infinite benefits you personally are reaping from society and the individuals that compose the collective that is society.

    Not one single randian objectivist I've ever spoken to has ever lived up to the ideals Rand invented for her novels - because it's fantasy.

    Applying Randian philosophy to politics is like me running a campaign and winning by using the magical theories of harry potter or the jedi school.
     
  22. Appleo

    Appleo Newly Registered

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    Well would you bother listening to anybody who wasn't convinced of their ideas as the truth?

    If you don't believe you have the truth, then what's the point?

    Your own belief that evolution and tribalism is man's nature is the truth to you, therefore you must be skeptical of yourself. You don't even believe in your own ideas as soon as you claim to have the truth.

    Just because humans in the past lived in tribes doesn't mean they should in the future.
     
  23. Appleo

    Appleo Newly Registered

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    It seems that you have already made up your mind, and you're using insults. If we're going to have a discussion, I want it to be respectful with both of us having an open mind.
     
  24. Aphotic

    Aphotic Banned

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    I hate to do this but in modern times there are three truths. Objective Truths, Political Truths, and Subjective Truths (Or "your truth".)

    I believe you have your truth, there are political truths, or falsehoods repeated until they become accepted as truths, and then there are objective truths which are verifiable truths that all people must accept.

    Evolution and tribalism is not my belief. It's an objective truth that you must accept. Because it is objective, it doesn't very much care what Rand has to say about the nobility of selfishness and other scandalous nonsense she peddled.

    My claim is that the baseline objective truth cannot be fundamentally altered by political or subjective truths.

    I never said they had to do so. I pointed out an obvious flaw in Rand's philosophy, which would result in catastrophic outcomes for the vast majority of people. This is why Randian philosophy is such a joke and why republicans that endorse it are called genocidal. It flies against our objectively true history and evolution as a tribal species of empathetic creatures to the members of our tribes.
     
  25. Aphotic

    Aphotic Banned

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    Do you believe social security is a welfare program? Or an earned benefit?

    I have to pay into it. I have a dear family friend who's father did not pay into it and worked under the table. He retired and was poor until his death because he had not earned SS.

    SS is not a welfare program insofar as you're trying to paint it.
     

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