FDRers Discuss Whether or Not it is Beneficial to Debate UPB

vichy · Number of posts: 918 Location: Northwest US Registration date: 2008-07-26

Yeah, haven't they been through enough?
I dunno, I think the Russians had it worse.[/i]

Danny Shahar · Number of posts: 948 Registration date: 2007-12-30

And the Russian Jews?

vichy · Number of posts: 918 Location: Northwest US Registration date: 2008-07-26

[quote="Danny Shahar"]And the Russian Jews?[/quote
Why, they were in charge of the Bolshevik Revolution!

Deep Purple · Number of posts: 127 Registration date: 2008-05-10

Danny Shahar wrote:

I don't hate them. I just find it irritating when they object to the name "swine flue" because pork isn't Kosher. I mean, really!

Haha, no kidding. It's already considered an unclean meat, you'd think they'd take this swine flu thing as proving that G-d was right in telling people not to eat it.

nelle · Number of posts: 485 Registration date: 2009-02-09

AND they are still trying to make sense of UPB. See here:

http://freedomainradio.com/board/forums/t/20338.aspx

and here:

http://freedomainradio.com/board/forums/t/20068.aspx

Danny Shahar · Number of posts: 948 Registration date: 2007-12-30

Hahaha!

KevinP wrote:

What I think is required is a set of rational outcomes, much like the eight implicit premises of debating from UPB (pp. 34-36, PDF), that will allow people to coexist on the same ethical plane. Without those common outcomes, how would a truly peaceful society come about?

And with a bright flash and a puff of smoke, UPB collapsed back into Objectivism...

vichy · Number of posts: 918 Location: Northwest US Registration date: 2008-07-26

And with a bright flash and a puff of smoke, UPB collapsed back into Objectivism...
Man qua man.

Conrad

Deep Purple wrote:

Danny Shahar wrote:

I don't hate them. I just find it irritating when they object to the name "swine flue" because pork isn't Kosher. I mean, really!

Haha, no kidding. It's already considered an unclean meat, you'd think they'd take this swine flu thing as proving that G-d was right in telling people not to eat it.

by the by, are there any sort of generally discussed ideas among Jewish people as to what God ws up to with that whole Holocaust thing? What they had done to 'deserve' this in their own eyes?

last night (Liberation Day in the Netherlands), watched a documentary about some Dutch people in a German concentration camp and Jesus fucking Christ, it was still shocking and mind-boggling as hell to listen to the interviews with the survivors. I mean, fucking hell, that people can do that to each other. I really liked the way the survivors told the story though, with even bits of nostalgia and humor and friendship in their stories, but also just talking about the insane things that the Germans and others did to them and their friends and others.

_________________
My Blog

vichy · Number of posts: 918 Location: Northwest US Registration date: 2008-07-26

by the by, are there any sort of generally discussed ideas among Jewish people as to what God ws up to with that whole Holocaust thing? What they had done to 'deserve' this in their own eyes?
There are jews who still believe in God?

some Dutch people in a German concentration camp and Jesus fucking Christ, it was still shocking and mind-boggling as hell to listen to the interviews with the survivors. I mean, fucking hell, that people can do that to each other.
I don't know - you have to have a pretty unrealistic view of human beings (much less the natural world in general) to be 'shocked' by this. Please, comfortable intellectual culture is a small part of human history, and there is a large segment of the population who is never quite satisfied with it. Nature is red in tooth and claw - what is odd is not that men kill one another, but they avoid doing so as frequently as they do.
And as far as how men 'treat' one another - well, they do no worse to pigs.

Conrad

vichy wrote:

by the by, are there any sort of generally discussed ideas among Jewish people as to what God ws up to with that whole Holocaust thing? What they had done to 'deserve' this in their own eyes?
There are jews who still believe in God?

some Dutch people in a German concentration camp and Jesus fucking Christ, it was still shocking and mind-boggling as hell to listen to the interviews with the survivors. I mean, fucking hell, that people can do that to each other.
I don't know - you have to have a pretty unrealistic view of human beings (much less the natural world in general) to be 'shocked' by this. Please, comfortable intellectual culture is a small part of human history, and there is a large segment of the population who is never quite satisfied with it. Nature is red in tooth and claw - what is odd is not that men kill one another, but they avoid doing so as frequently as they do.
And as far as how men 'treat' one another - well, they do no worse to pigs.

Yes yes, you can say all of that and it may all be true, but that doesn't take anything away from the shock and horror and bewilderment of what people can do to each other.

on a high enough level of abstraction my response to your response is similar to Hofstadter's Law: Everything always takes more time than you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law'

chew on that for a while

_________________
My Blog

vichy · Number of posts: 918 Location: Northwest US Registration date: 2008-07-26

Yes yes, you can say all of that and it may all be true, but that doesn't take anything away from the shock and horror and bewilderment of what people can do to each other.
Well, that's just a low synchronity between your abstract knowledge and your emotional-habitual responses. Nonetheless, by the time I read about Nazis I knew enough about history to not be surprised at all. And it's not as though they were especially bad, among dictator-types. They were just wealthier.

on a high enough level of abstraction my response to your response is similar to Hofstadter's Law: Everything always takes more time than you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law'
I don't even agree with the premises. Hell, I'm not even sure I know what you're talking about. I'll need some meat before I start chewing.

Conrad

vichy wrote:

Yes yes, you can say all of that and it may all be true, but that doesn't take anything away from the shock and horror and bewilderment of what people can do to each other.
Well, that's just a low synchronity between your abstract knowledge and your emotional-habitual responses. Nonetheless, by the time I read about Nazis I knew enough about history to not be surprised at all. And it's not as though they were especially bad, among dictator-types. They were just wealthier.

the problem here is exactly as you point it out, namely the difference between abstract knowledge and emotional-habitual responses (what normal people would call 'a sense of morality, sympathy etc.'), and the shock won't disappear as long as that is in place, never mind whatever abstract knowledge you have

Quote:

on a high enough level of abstraction my response to your response is similar to Hofstadter's Law: Everything always takes more time than you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law'
I don't even agree with the premises. Hell, I'm not even sure I know what you're talking about. I'll need some meat before I start chewing.

[/quote]
meat provided above, but since you're allergic to one ingredient in it (errible metaphor-extension here), you'll likely won't chew on it anyway

_________________
My Blog

Guest

nelle wrote:

AND they are still trying to make sense of UPB. See here:

http://freedomainradio.com/board/forums/t/20338.aspx

and here:

http://freedomainradio.com/board/forums/t/20068.aspx

"The NAP follows logically from the universality of property rights, or rather, they are two sides of the same coin. To say that person X has the right to own and control his property is equivalent to saying that everyone else have the obligation not to enforce X to use that property in a certain way. Ergo, if property rights is valid, the NAP must be valid."

If that's true, then UPB certainly doesn't "demonstrating the non-aggression principle", since Stef's arguments for the "validity" (a.k.a. logical necessity) of property rights are ridiculously moronic and flagrantly contradictory.

The whole idea that property rights are something that can be "valid" or "invalid" makes absolutely no sense. Sure, they can be recognized or not recognized... enforced or not enforced, but it's meaningless to say whether they are "valid" or not. It's like arguing over whether traffic laws are "valid" or not. It just makes no sense. A "property right" is not an argument or equation. It's a social construct/system of rules governing the control of property.

Stef has stated unequivocally that there are no such things as "rights", and that there's no such thing as "proving property rights", and yet he and his fellow Stafantologists STILL try to use property rights as some sort of axiom to "prove" Libertarian ethics.

It's an outrage I say!

Dylboz · Number of posts: 2014 Registration date: 2007-09-20

Outrageous!

_________________
Please check out my blog!
Dylboznia

Danny Shahar · Number of posts: 948 Registration date: 2007-12-30

Reign, perhaps it has something to do with the way that Stefan basically seeks to establish all of his ethical claims by modus tollens? Asserting the existence of rights seems like a positive ethical claim, and Stefan simply has no philosophical artillery for doing such a thing since he has no axiology. What he has to try to do is to establish that anything else besides respecting property "rights" is unacceptable, so those rights effectively exist even if there aren't actually any rights.

In other words, to have a right to something involves some sort of normative claim that's based on something about the right-holder, and not on the would-be aggressor -- it's wrong to violate my right partly because of what happens to me. But Stefan's theory doesn't give us anything with which to do that; the only thing we can do is criticize the person's actions on their own account. So, then, it wouldn't really make sense to talk about "rights." However, if we think of rights simply as delineations of boundaries, then people could have "rights" in this sense to the extent that crossing certain boundaries would not be justifiable.