August Spies

99percent are you EVER going to explain yourself?

explain your definition of objective please.

Marvin

David Boaz little essay should be entitled, The Nebulous Wonders of Double Talk. LOL Spontaneous laws? Thomas Paine a libertarian? Damn he wrote of makind's needs to recognize nature beautiful and delicate balance and our needs to live within these confines.

Martin Buber (yawn good night)

Gurdur

Not at all.
I gave you clear defintions of subjectivity, objectivity and intersubjectivity; I asked you your own definitions regarding these terms, since they bear upon the naming and claims of Objectivism.
BTW, after your recent disruptive performance, I'll take no abuse from you as to my being "confrontational" or "derailing".
Clear ?

You owe me answers, if you wish to discuss on this board instead of just preaching, and you also owe me as everyone else to make clear when you are speaking as a mod or just personal opinion.

Yes, it did.
I'm asking you again; the nature of the term "objectivity" as standardly defined excludes the semi-philosophy known as Objectivism.
Your reactions ? Your definitions ?

You continually make assertions on this board as to Objectivism. So how about answering questions and criticisms ?

Thomas Ash

I think it's pretty clear that by "objective" 99percent simply meant the existence of an objective morality. I'm sure you can find a thread somewhere on the Moral Foundations and Principles board where you can see what people who think there is an objective morality (like me, for the record) mean by it.

Thomas Ash

Does anyone else see this as a big problem for libertarianism? People's obtaining of these property rights for unproduced property though 'first use' seems completely arbitrary. Rights for produced property may make more sense, but for all non-intellectual property if you trace the history of ownership of components far enough back, it always comes down to big men with clubs taking it through strength.

Yes, a big problem if you think like I do that most libertarians are libertarians because of a belief in certain absolute first principles.
Well, like I said above, I don't agree with this. I think most people who are libertarians (as opposed to conservatives who just don't like taxes) are libertarians because of a genuinely radical post-Enlightenment notion of natural rights. As other people have pointed out, libertarianism is a very radical political position because of this.

RED DAVE

Quoting Thomas Ash:

This is quite acute and very revealing. The face is that the "radical post-Enlightenment notion of natural rights" is an extraordinarily dated political philosophy that was fraught with contradiction when it evolved two hundred years ago. To present this mode of thought as if it were something new is bogus. I always found it fascinating that Ayn Rand used the term The Romantic Manifesto as a title and Libertarians constantly refer to 18th Century figures: Jefferson, et al., as model figures.

The reason for this is clear, to me at least. By 1830, the locus of revolution and radicalism had shifted away from the bourgeoisie and to the masses, the people, the proletariat. After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, the bourgeosie in France and Germany had made their peace with history (a bad phrase, I know) and themselves became the conservative force to revolt against. This contradiction was already present in the French Revolution when a faction of capitalist revolutionaries, the middle-class Jacobins, placed themselves at the head of the people, the Paris masses, and were devoured as the revolution turned to the right.

By 1879, the Paris Commune, the proletariat had placed itself at the center of the struggle for freedom, and the massacre of Communards by the forces of reaction is a simple demonstration of this.

It has always seemed to me that Libertarians, when they didn't have a slight whiff of fashionable fascism about them (the Objectivists of the early Sixties could have stepped out of the International Set around Hitler in the Thirties), had a distinct 19th Century attitude. It is interesting that in Atlas Shrugs , Rand builds her novel around the railroad industry, a product of the 19th Century, which, by the 1950s, was in decline, and the hero of The Fountainhead, modeled somewhat after Frank Lloyd Wright (who started out his career as something of a socialist and then turned right in his old age), a distinctly "old-fashioned" figure by the mid 20Century.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Political Trajectory

What is the sticking point is the Russian Revolution. Rand's hatred of Communism was proverbial: she and her family suffered under Stalin's counter-revolution. The socialist revolution failed. It was defeated by outside attacks by the capitalist countires and succumbed to its own contradictions. The most backward elements of the Communist Party became the state capitalist ruling class. This was a blow to freedom and to the working class movement from which the world has never recovered.

Into this gap, where Communism can be used to discredit radicalism, socialism, bohemianism, steps a curious kind of right wing radical. Utterly divorced from popular movements for freedom: civil rights, anti-war, feminism, labor, etc., and, in fact, opposed to them, they retain a kind of archaic radical attitude, that is devoid of any real radical values (any fool can support legalization of marijuana) and instead, glorifies capitalist values.

But the contradictions are there. You can't be a true radical and support capitalism. All you do is posture, argue and, in the end, swallow whatever Bush & Co. will serve you.

RED DAVE

99Percent

RED DAVEWho says we are are presenting this mode of thought as new when we obviosly look up at 18th century figures as models?

There can be no such thing as "capitalist revolutionaries", because capitalism requires order established by the state. The most a "radical" capitalist can do is to refuse to put into work his own capital, by keeping gold in a safe for example.

Curious how you portray ideologies as "fashionable" with "attitudes", or simply rehashes of "styles". It seems that you fail to see that Libertarianism is neither leftist or rightist.

Rand's family suffered right after the Russian revolution of 1917, under Leninism.

During Rand's lifetime communism and socialism was very strong. Rand was particularly concerned of the tendencies towards collectivism in western countries, mainly in the U.S., like FDR's New Deal. That is why she was so vociferous about it. I am not sure what you mean by the Communist Party becoming the state capilatist ruling class, this appears to be a contradiction.

No, because libertarianism is based on principles, principles of freedom for the individual not on "attitudes" of the "fashionable" majority at the moment. Capitalism is not simply "glorified" but derived from actual principles of freedom. That is why it is hypocritical to demand freedom to smoke pot but at the same also demand the state to support irresponsible lifestyles through the welfare state.

99Percent

Of what good is a property if it is not producing anything? If I inherit a property and then not work on it then it becomes a burden for me, a waste of my time. I will quickly sell it and and at a lower price to someone who is willing to work for it.I fail to see where the problem is. If someone violates the principle of first agression then that person should be deprived of its liberty. How much time he should be in jail can be democratically determined.Libertarianism is not an ideology that requires it to be radical for it to have any meaning such as communism. It can be implemented gradually by eliminating gradually eliminating taxes, government social programs and abolishing laws for consensual crimes. For example in Nevada an initiative was passed to decriminilized marijuana. Social security can gradually be privatized, etc.

Thomas Ash

Yes, it is interesting that Rand used the term 'romantic.' Romantics were of course people who placed individualism and the fulfillment of your own desires above all else, and wanted people to be free from the constraints of society, so I can begin to see why. My point was partly that libertarians do have a distinctive ideology, but also that this rests on a very specific, quite modern (doesn't mean it's automatically wrong, of course) notion of natural rights.
99percent:
There was such a thing as "fashionable fascism" and "sink or swim" Social Darwinism in the interwar period, and though most modern libertarians are completely divorced from it, I think Rand may have capitalized on it.

thefugitivesaint

99%:
Well, Red Dave has it partially wrong. The "Communist Party" was actually the "Bolshevik Party" which, through various measures, equated its own position to "Communism" proper. After the Bolshivks came to power they gradually eliminated all opposition to their control of political power. Lenin implimented a program of "State Capitalism" which was meant to be a form of "Capitalism without the capitalists" but the enterprise failed horribly. A State controlled Capitalism is still capitalism and the ills the boshivks claimed to be redressing did not "wither away" under their control. In fact, the actions taken by the Bolshivks helped create the perfect environment for a Stalin. But, i digress.

Thomas Ash:
Now, some people may use "natural rights" to support their position but i have yet to encounter a convincing argument supporting the notion itself. Even the more "atheist" tendencies of "natural rights" still seem to rely on dubious notions like "objective truth" and the like. The theistic baggage is merely presented to us again in a different package. We could, of course, discuss the notion but it would be an unnecessary diversion.

I would have to disagree with this assestment. I think that most Libertarians do maintain, in some form or another, the attitudes expressed in "social darwinism"." The sentiment of individual self-interest, no matter how myopic the results, are embraced out of principle. The very idea of "unrestrained" freedom for all so that "each can pursue their own good" entails a certain sense of "get what you can while you can and screw everyone else." Most of the Libertarians i know are very adament about stating things as thus and i have ceased found it important to contradict them on this. It's become a waste of my time to try especially given most of their lack of knoweldge concerning the actual processes of Capitalist activity.

But, it's not very clear to us, those who question the concept of an "objective morality", what 99% is trying to attempt by postulating the existence of something that has so many conceptual holes and shortcomings.

I do not deny that certain parameters might be necessary for species to survive. These parameters might even be shared here and there across species lines but this does not entail that the requirements established by the specific needs of each species is an "objective" one. Morality is not gravity and we are not compelled to obey any established form of morality. Even if we agreed to acknowledge that every species on this planet followed certain set guidelines it would be understandable but faulty to assume that all species, on every other planet had the same guidelines as well. Even if we did agree on the notion of every species following the same patterns in development we could only safely assert that those patterns were evident precisely because they took place on this planet specifically. All we would have to do, to discredit the notion of "objective morality" is discover a species that acted in a manner contrary to the established premise held by the notion. I can think of many different speices that could possibly exist which could have develooped a sense of "morality" that was completely alien to us or so very different as to be completely misunderstood.

"Objective Morality" seems to be a notion inherited from Theism. I find it untenable and not worth the investment of energy to defend. But, that's just me.

Sorry i failed to comment on "Libertarianism" proper.
-theSaint