Donald Fires FBI Director who's investigating Russian Election Hacking

[Gameface]

I see Objectivism at its core as Rand’s extension of Immanuel Kant. Rand was interesting to me when I was younger, and was truly my gateway into Libertarianism, but to me personally Kant’s ideology didn’t resonate in the way John Locke’s did. It took me a long time to put my finger on what it was but I think I figured it out. The ideology of Immanuel Kant and Ayn Rand is just too atheist.

It doesn’t matter at all to me if someone believes in a magic person in the sky who created everything. If you do, that is great. If you don’t, that is great too. For my personal journey, I bought in when I was a kid, started questioning everything and believing all of it was ******** in my teenage years, then later gained an understand of why the idea of god was there to begin with.

I see god as the future personified. It really doesn’t make a difference if it is an all-seeing, all-powerful guy with a gray beard who writes everything down to weigh your soul or the idea that all secrets will come out eventually and how that will shape the way people will see you even after you are gone. It is the same thing. God gets you to act in your long-term best interests even at the expense of your short-term best interest. Biologically we are wired to do the opposite. Pleasing god or pleasing the future is what makes people successful. I think that is why every ancient society had god or gods. The names change. The clothes change. The stories and drama changes but it always seems to be there.

Immanuel Kant and Ayn Rand were such raging atheists that they ripped that whole idea out. When you wrote that “each of us owns our own existence and that we have no inherent obligation to anyone else other than our minor children”, it works perfectly with Objectivism but you didn’t stop there. You kept writing and what you wrote after that starts to fill the hole Kant and Rand built into their ideology. You created your own structure of sins or at least that is how I read it.

You probably know more about the different schools of objectivism as it didn’t really fit with me, but that is what made me wonder about what you meant in your usage of “our minor children”. Should it be read in the objectivist sense of sentence it was in, that it was all about you and yours? Or should it read in the non-objectivists sense of the global future generation that will carry on after us? If I had to guess, you meant it in the genetic sense and you had two ideas that didn’t quite fit together.

Now that you've got me thinking about it I agree, it was a contradiction.

I was referring to a person's genetic offspring. A person can surrender custody of their minor children if they don't wish to care for them. That's even in this non-libertarian society. But I wonder, in an actual libertarian society, who would a person surrender their child to? If they had no takers would they be free to abandon their child to the wild world?

I don't really consider myself a Libertarian anymore, not for about 8 years or so. For one, I felt like there were unresolvable contradictions within Objectivism that made it impossible to work in any human society anywhere, even with a blank slate, let alone the impossibility to transitioning a society to objectivist style libertarianism. For another, I abhor what people who label themselves as Libertarians in a political sense define libertarianism as. It is completely foreign to my concept of libertarianism.

 

[Al-O-Meter]

I wonder, in an actual libertarian society, who would a person surrender their child to? If they had no takers would they be free to abandon their child to the wild world?

Maybe in an Ancap world. In a libertarian society I think it would depend on the libertarians making the rules. The term “libertarian” has such a broad meaning that the label itself doesn’t convey much information.

I felt like there were unresolvable contradictions within Objectivism that made it impossible to work in any human society anywhere, even with a blank slate, let alone the impossibility to transitioning a society to objectivist style libertarianism. For another, I abhor what people who label themselves as Libertarians in a political sense define libertarianism as. It is completely foreign to my concept of libertarianism.

I think I can see where you stand in a rough sense. In some places we will see eye-to-eye, and in others we definitely will not but I recognize the work you’ve put in.

 

[leftyjace]

Nice.
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