The Ivory Tower

This is a place for me to think out loud (or 'on paper') all things that are interesting me, and to comment on things I want to remember. Naming my blog the Ivory Tower is a joke on the popular notion that philosophy and intelligence are something beyond the common man, somehow above the 'mean' act of living as a human. Rand's refutation of this is what immediately drew me to her. Feel free to introduce yourself.

6.28.2005

A Whole Can-O-Justice

Freestar Media Press Release

::raucous laughter::

sigh...but seriously; if this gets approved by the 3 selectmen votes, I wonder if Justice Souter will contest it in court. And if he does, who will he get to represent him? Even a great lawyer knows to get an attorney if he himself needs one. I don't think the Institute for Justice would take Souter's case, but it would amazingly ironic if they chose to defend Clements rather than him.

6.24.2005

Whatever happened to property rights...anyone?

Justices Affirm Property Seizures

So, now the government may seize property not for "public use" but for "public purpose". That is an inch away from "public good" and I am worried that this sort of statism is going to be allowed. That the American people will not be outraged by this.

But if there is anything more scary in this event than the blatant defacement of property rights, it's that Justice Stevens thinks that "[t]he court should not 'second-guess' local governments". If the Supreme Court has decided that they don't have the power to "second-guess" legislators then we may as well toss our notion of checks and balances. When does a hesitance to check local legislators spread to state and federal legislators? And why is Stevens so quick to make himself ineffectual?

I also recently discovered the impotence of patent laws, so all-in-all, I'm pretty pissed about property rights. I'm considering becoming a hermit and hiding on a mountain, because what the hell am I going to do? How can I achieve any of the things I planned for my life if I have to protect myself not only from ordinary thieves but also the government? It's like this giant mouldering pit of blackness stretching out like a chasm and I don't know how to fix it.

Update [6.27.2005]: Related items
ARI Op-Ed
Cap. Mag. Article
Property Wrongs by Cox and Forkum

6.22.2005

Scholarship

I'm transferring to Purdue, and my bank account is getting the shit beat out of it. I'll need like 29,000 every year, and right now I'm behind 13,000. So, I'm entering every and any scholarship I can, sending letters to private corporations, and getting loan estimates from banks.

I just entered this scholarship contest for 10,000. That would help; that would help a lot! I was supposed to write a 500 (or less) word essay about what I think is the most important choice I have to make in my life to be happy and successful. I think I did well, I'm fond of my little essay, but keep your fingers crossed.

Owning and Living My Life

The defining choice I’ve made in my life, the choice which precedes happiness, is the choice to acknowledge that I own my life. Every human owns their life by the fact of volition, but some choose to abstain from asserting that right. I choose to claim the right to my life and the productive work therein.
Owning my life means that I have complete responsibility for it. It means that I choose to act and think as I do; and I claim the consequences of all my actions and thoughts. Since my actions and thoughts are my own, I must decide upon morals to govern those. And since I own my life, the choice of morals is my own. I don’t expect the morals of any other person to work in place of my own. Morality means that which is beneficial to my life, because I own and must act to keep it. This emphatically does not mean that I do whatever I please.
Let me give some examples. The law states that I’m not allowed to drink alcohol because I’m under 21. I do not drink alcohol because it will a.) make me temporarily stupid and b.) physically harm me. Owning my life means that I choose whether or not I want to drink alcohol by rationally considering the value and consequences of doing so. The same applies to criminal behaviour. I do not condone murder because I respect my life and don’t want to be murdered. I don’t steal because I value my own property and my right to it.
Owning my life also means that I have the duty of either sustaining it or not. I produce the means for my survival, either with my mental or physical labor. If I need a gallon of milk I buy it with money which I have earned. The money I have earned is derived from my ability to work and exchange my work in a mutual trade. Since I want an education, in order to achieve the goals of my life, I must acquire the money to pay for that education. I am writing to earn the money by answering with the ability of my words. I hope my ability is great enough to please those who are willing to give money in order that I may get an education. But the means is not achieved by begging; rather it is achieved by proving my self-worth.
I think this makes me wholly selfish; everything I do is for my own benefit. I make friends to gain conversation and human contact. I trust that those with which I make friends do so for similarly selfish reasons. Our interaction is mutual, not parasitic. Because I have chosen to own my life, I love out of happiness rather than pity.
Happiness comes from living your life well. I can’t imagine any better way to do so than by thoroughly owning it every day.


Update [7.15.2005]: I made it to the finals! There were 7,000 entries and 140 were chosen as finalists to be published in the companies' promotional book. 10 of those will be chosen to receive 1,000 scholarship each.

So I was mistaken; it's 1,000, not 10,000. But 1/14 chance for 1,000 might be better than 1/140 chance at 10,000. Of course, the judging isn't random; it's based on merit, so I think my chances are considerably better than 1/14. I'll know in November how my essay fared. I wish I could be there during the judging to see what the mysterious 'they' have to say about my essay.

6.13.2005

Google, how could you!

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." http://www.google.com/corporate/

Google's noble goal and unparalleled ability to achieve that goal has been an inspiration since the day I learned of it. Now, they have taken their greatest virtue, destroyed it, and apologized for it. All for the sake of their philosophical enemies, who want to destroy independence and liberty by making knowledge universally inaccessible. It breaks my heart. It's like watching Hercules in his madness, except in Google's case it is self-induced. I feel betrayed.

Update [7.22.2005]: To remove expired news link. See comments for summary.

6.09.2005

The Importance of Context When Evaluating Morality

Recently I began to understand what it means to concretize abstractions (courtesy Ed From OC on The Forum). It means that you increase your understanding of a concept (or an "abstract", I'm not sure what the difference is) by creating a bank of experience or examples. For instance, one can describe "red" but you don't really understand what it represents until you've experienced many examples of red, and have explicitly identified these examples as red. The more examples you amass the clearer you're understanding of red is. For example, if a red ball is identified as red, you can't initially know if "red" refers to it's color, orientation, shape, material, textural/biological characteristic, the sound it makes, etc. But when you have many cases you can identify the pattern and label it "red". I think that is what integrating is, you take a large mass of data and identify patterns and relationships. (But that's another topic.)

And so, one fine day, with my new found definition of concretization I found my self saying "I'll just have to make a little compromise". It struck me immediately that I have never liked compromises as such and I hate the idea of doing it myself, yet I was not feeling particularly loathsome about this specific compromise. Which seemed a horrible contradiction. So I identified my warrant (or premise) for considering the action immoral. It was: all compromises are immoral. Well, in this situation, I had had to choose between two cds I liked because I didn't have enough money for both, which I don't think is immoral in the least. I was confused, at first, as to what was wrong with my warrant. When I realized that it was missing a qualifier and that my situation didn't apply to that qualifier. The qualifier being: ...when you sacrifice a value for a non-value. I was simply choosing between two values (which is often necessary) but didn't "sacrifice" a value. Not only did I explicitly identify two types of compromise and the morality for each, but it also became a good example of the importance of context. Or, a concretization of the concept "context". Because in order to distinguish between a moral and immoral compromise I had to identify two different context, or "in this situation", without that I could only have concluded that either I am base (because I seemingly had no objection to immorality) or that morality is arbitrary.

6.01.2005

Portrait


I need to post this picture so I can add it to my profile since the profile only accepts images that are hosted and have a URL. So I'm going to hide it way back here and hope nobody finds it. If you do happen to stumble upon this post, disregard it. It's a somewhat sloppy quick fix until I can find/afford better web hosting for pictures.

Shit, I thought I found a valid domain for my pictures: