Priceless. And Free. 1

• Alain Briand III

  One of the many reason I am a objectivist. Rational self-interests is the logical course of morality.

  

  Ayn Rand - Love is Selfish

  www.youtube.com

  Ayn Rand explains how real love and friendship must be in accord with one's rational self-interest.http://www.LibertyPen.com/

   ·  ·  · Share · September 15 at 7:30pm

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      Mark as Spam

      David Christopher Arnold Defend this. Many modern economic arguments not only show that people are not rational actors, that they fall for stupid things that a "rational actor" wouldn't fall for all the time.
      
      But there's nothing ethical about self-interest. Especially when you start getting into the idea that people's self-interest does not always agree with what would be beneficial to them.

      September 15 at 9:04pm · 
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      Alain Briand III Its rational self-interest. Something you can prove was the best action in a given situation. Did you watch the video? It gives several examples. There is nothing ethical about self-interest? that would be to say that selflessness ethical EI altruism. Altruism is a impossible logical practice. If one where to be truly selfless they would kill themselves as the take up resources. Notice all the sighs of a suicidal person. They give valuable positions to people, they appoligys for there burden on the world, they seem to be overwhelmingly kind. Its is because a suicidal person has little to no self-esteem. They are thinking completely non-selfishly. If someone's family was starving and they found food and there was another stranger who wanted food after they had gatherd it the altruist would give them the food and let there family die, the rational egoist would ignore them as there self preservation as well as their family, which give him happiness, is more impotent to them. this is rational egoism. As for "when you start getting into the idea that people's self-interest does not always agree with what would be beneficial to them." your referring to irrational egoism such as hedonism. If someone is going to be a fool and live for the moment without considering the long term rational interest that is to there own self-destruction. Peaples primary self-interest should be there life and there happiness not there next fix. IDK what your getting at in respect to economics.

      September 15 at 9:33pm · 
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      David Christopher Arnold To say the ultimate act of altruism is starving to death to save everyone else is seriously missing a point - sustainable altruism that comes at a low cost can provide a huge benefit to the giver. You're straw-manning altruism and avoiding talking about altruism by doing so.
      
      To represent altruism with a metaphor involving suicidal people, in fact, sort of pisses on a lot of things like Jonas Salk's altruistic act when he made the polio vaccine a general open patent rather than his own - he refused to profit from the sales of something he believed should have been free.
      
      And besides, if you have to talk about starving people to illustrate your thoughts on how selfishness applies in the real world, you're already missing the point. Starving people don't have time for selfless investments of time, because they are too busy trying to eat.
      
      In the last case, you simply betray your lack of knowledge of the way humans make decisions - largely, in fact, according to recent neuroscience, they do not make them at all. Emotions, previous experiences, environmental awareness, timing - such as whether the person recently had a sating meal, all of these things that they do not control affect every single decision a person makes.
      
      The only space left for free will, in current neuroscience, is the kind of long-term planning one makes when one plans their major. All the rest is simple biochemistry.

      September 15 at 9:44pm · 
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      Alain Briand III Allow me to take the time to brake down every clam you made.
      
      “To say the ultimate act of altruism is starving to death to save everyone else is seriously missing a point - sustainable altruism that comes at a low cost can provide a huge benefit to the giver. You're straw-manning altruism and avoiding talking about altruism by doing so.”
      
      First allow me to define what altruism is as A LOT of people missunderstand its meaning. Altruism is defined as the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. Disintrested is the key word. If you where interested it would fall underselfishness. If there were a big pay back for giving something it is not altruism. Its is rational self-interest. I would give 5$ to a man if I know I would get 100$ in return the next day. That’s selfish not selfless
      
      “To say the ultimate act of altruism is starving to death to save everyone else is seriously missing a point” you replacing my contest . Perhaps I was not clear enough. I am talking about an act of suicide that is to no benefit to anyone. As in a person is depressed enough to take there own life as in hanging yourself. To be capable of such an action one must be disinterested in there own life EI completely selfless. This isn’t the same as killing yourself to save someone of value like a spouse. To give a greater contest altuism would be killing your self to save you enemy IE Someone that will do harm to your love ones or you. Because by definition for someone to be altruistic they must be disinterested if they did not save there enemy it would be because they would harm there loved ones. They are then interested in the well being of there loved ones. You can not be interested and altruistic in a selfless context.
      
      This is by no means a straw man. There is no in-between from selfishness and selflessness. This is by no means a false dichotomy. You clamed that selfishness is not ethical. My counter is that it is. I gave examples of how rational egoism is good and how altruism is bad. IDK how this is avoiding your clam.

      September 15 at 10:55pm · 
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      Alain Briand III “In the last case, you simply betray your lack of knowledge of the way humans make decisions - largely, in fact, according to recent neuroscience, they do not make them at all. Emotions, previous experiences, environmental awareness, timing - such as whether the person recently had a sating meal, all of these things that they do not control affect every single decision a person makes.
      
      The only space left for free will, in current neuroscience, is the kind of long-term planning one makes when one plans their major. All the rest is simple biochemistry.”
      
      You’re going into physiological determinism. Determinism is a self-refuting ideology. It clams that man is a zombie or an unthinking instinctual beast. Nobody can clam any knowledge in such an ideology. Because any conclusion one gains is only a result of the totality of there past. I don’t understand how in this ideology man was any free will in any form be it in there short term or long term planning as you clam.
      
      Man is a being of volitional continuances. You either think or do not think. You can either answer the major questions like “what should I do” or drift and react to anything that passes. You can trust your mind and forge the idea that there is no god or trust other people’s ideas, trust that they are right and not think for yourself.
      
      Where do you think emotions come from? There not mysteries instances. They come from someone conscious or sub- conscious understanding of something. There metaphysical understanding of the world. There a consequence of understanding not dictators of action. One doesn’t get angry, sad, or depressed without reason.
      
      As for environmental awareness and “timing” I assume you mean all that one analyzes empirically in any given situation. How instantaneous dose something such as a threat have to be for in to be a instinctual action Vs a quick analyze and conclusion. If a bolder is rolling toward me I can run away from it as it roll ever closer or I can move out of its path.
      
      K…the wore me a bit. Get back to me. I could go on but I think this will serfice for now.

      September 15 at 10:55pm · 
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      David Christopher Arnold So, if you were to read your post just now without metaphysics, you'll realize how I saw it - and that is as a tattered sheet of loosely-connected ideas that miss most of the relevant information. To say that our emotions come from metaphysics means you weren't paying attention in psychology 101, or haven't taken it.

      September 16 at 12:07am · 
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      David Christopher Arnold As for the rest, I'm too tired to pick it apart at the moment, but I'll post in the morning. :)

      September 16 at 12:07am · 
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      Mark as Spam

      Alain Briand III Well whats reverent? What are we talking about and what should I focus my argument on? I'm was attempting to defend that rational self-interest is the proper morality. You said it was not ethical. I gave examples of how altruism fails and rational egoism dose not. You counters by saying I'm missing the point and that we have no free will (or that we don't unless where thinking long turm. witch doesn't work) Also I didn't say emotions where metaphysical. I said that emotions are a consequences of ones Funderstanding of reality IE Metaphysics. If you think someones trust worthy and they turn out they are not your going to get upset is some form. As a consequence of you emotions you will have a physical response be is crying, a adrenalin rush, or fitege. The emotions are not independent of reason.

      September 16 at 12:54am · 
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      Alain Briand III Now I will admit I am not responding in a 100% focused manner but this isn’t a paper or something of great important. I am having truble fully understanding your rebudil as you started with something to do with economics and the clam that self-interest isn’t ethical. Then you go to a loose clam to physiological determinism. When your up to it late us start on a clean slate. I stand that rational egoism is the proper moral philosophy. Rational egoism being the most logical course of action to fulfill ones life and happiness. As a consequence of this stance altruism is immoral. This being on an objectivist philosophy if you are not formiler its metaphysical stance is objective reality (reality is independent of wishes, fears, emotion, prier, ect.) and its epistemology is reason. Reason in respect to objectivist epistemology being empiricism in the sense that are senses are the only means of obtaining knowledge and that we have a cognitive, volitional faculty of continuances. You being an atheist I’m share you fallow these philosophical stances in some form (at the very lest objective reality). I look forward to your rebottle as it gives me an opportunity to practice defending objectivism. Good luck.

      September 16 at 12:54am · 

  Steve Bass

  Kick ass! Thanks Tiffany: I hope you realize what you've stepped in! This may give you a clue: http://hipgnosis21.blogspot.com/

  hipgnosis

  hipgnosis21.blogspot.com

   ·  ·  · Share · September 15 at 11:54pm nearColorado Springs
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  Steve Bass was added by Tiffany UltrabergGreenberg.

   ·  ·  · September 15 at 11:47pm

Interlude 1

This stuff I'm posting is "Non-Fiction", whatever that is. I you are a labeler, "Creative Non-Fiction" will nail it down OK thus far. It feels like art to me. Please read it that way that way, gently.

The day after I put up Holmes Sweet Holmes I heard the cops were harassing the campers again. Imagine that. They didn't hear it from me; no one read the post down at the Command Center. It's "only" synchronicity. It still won't work.

Consider the Lilies

My friends are no doubt a scrappy bunch. It's no big surprise that guys like Jon and Adam and--holy shit--Skip, are pissed off and ready to burn a few barns down, so to speak. I don't think I need to look up a bunch of fancy references to convince anyone that things are dire, dire, dire. The college students I went hiking with yesterday afternoon will have to live what, like 20,0000 years to pay off the stupid shell-game debt they supposedly owe. Some guy on Adam's page was trying to convince me the whole business is thus because we never pay our bills. Bullshit. It's like this because a buncha paranoid Fascist clowns have set up a little magick trick to try and convince us  they have some legitimate claim to all the cheese. THEY DO NOT!!!

So there's a fight working alright, and I've been in it since I was a potential in my Granddad's genetic line. But I recently noticed--this is so weird--we're all fighting the wrong guy, and he is us. If we collapse our little bubble here in our little gob of the quantum foam, we're all screwed; not just us little guys. And we really do have enough guys to kick their Fascist asses on the way down. But guess what, we've all got it wrong!

Like it or not we're all in this together. We're each and every one of us as fucked up as the Devil!!! Shit he may have been the only sane one all along--but now I'm just picking at scales. Sorry. Didn't meant to. Ahem. Point is some of us are fucked up differently than others. It doesn't matter. That crackhead? Fuck-ed. The cop beating him down? Fuck-ed. Dominique Kahn-Strauss? Fuck-ed. Who else? The Pope? Me? You? Yeah, you're starting to anticipate if not grok me.

I'm a tool. Sometimes I'm also a dick and an asshole. That's another matter--I'm happy about being a tool.

A while ago I came back to Colorado from a trip back to Cleveland for the great John Covert's 95th birthday party. The moment I returned to my adopted home town, every television set in the danged known Universe began to trumpet the imminent falling of the sky, talking heads of every political stripe and linguistic camp bewailing the unavoidable  collapse of the American dollar and the entire foundation of all civilization along with it. I found myself with time on my hands, so I started tinkering with this blog as nothing more than an outlet for some frustrations, and a place to sling a bit of my ordinary schtick, mainly just at myself, assuming I'd be the only one reading. I played around on Facebook a little meaning nothing more than to hunt down a few friends from the distant past. That's what FB is for, right? A series of rapidly developing events took place and I soon found myself in the position I mean to describe right now, as best as I am able.

I guess I can't recall the first moment I was told I could write. It hasn't really mattered til recently--everyone knows writing is one of those career choices pursued by quixotic artsy-fartsy types that were willing to sacrifice creature comforts on the off chance someone might give a shit, and that the big bucks might roll in, easy-pleasy. Like hitting the lottery or breaking into the billboard charts with your high-school garage band, right? Besides, writers as a breed must, by necessity, possess a form of self-deluded arrogance that they have things to say of such verity and import that people will be compelled to actually pay money to subject themselves to the grief of listening to the blather produced in the effort to be a big deal. It was never like that. I just wanted something to fill the time that wouldn't dissolve my brains like the all to comfortable slide into awareness of regularly scheduled TV programming was beginning to do.

Somewhere in the midst of Facebooking about how we need a new econo-political paradigm it became apparent that bitching about this need had long been a habit of mine, as well as of many of my friends. I've always been a pretty good bitcher, too, in fact, when I entered the foundationless world of a self-employed remodeler it was a sense of the futility of bellyaching about how paint companies were managed. My brother and I had enough faith in our pooled abilities to believe we could do things better than the people running outfits for which we had worked to strike under our own banner. The key words in this were and remain "faith" and "believe".

So it occurred to me that if I really believe my own drivel, I ought to live it out.

Well that was an eye-opener. Very little pursuit of that idea led me to examine just what I actually believe, which turns out to be quite a bit, and quite at odds with the established order of things. I started, as is my wont, to contemplate God, and the deeper nature of things. I thought about how this transposes to something manageable in this "real" world. We have to work at a job, right? We have to round up bacon we can trade for goods, services, support for our children, and so on. But wait a minute--20 years of self-employment, and I was broke, money-wise, and most of my relationships were broke in some sense as well, though in most instances I couldn't tell how, or how to fix it. Seemed the thing I was best at doing was bitching. Where's the fun in that?

But I do believe in God, right, even though I've managed to get myself thrown out of both Christian churches and sorta like devil-worshiping occult groups because my notions of God are...unconventional. Enough so I'm usually inclined to put quotation marks around "God" when I type the word, and to feel compelled to issue tedious disclaimers about how I differ from the general milieu of thinkers on the matter.

An experiment in ontological ideoplasticity.

This whole thing is about stuff I believe. I'm kinda stuck at that level, since there's not much I know. Some of what I believe has to do with what other folks believe, so I'll be pretty much doing what a lot of other folks do, in a lot of ways. In some

Whoa!!! Blah Blah F-ing Blah.

Mt 6

 ²⁵Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

 ²⁶Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

 ²⁷Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

 ²⁸And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

 ²⁹And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

 ³⁰Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

My apologies to any devil-worshiping freaks I may have just offended. You're wrong, anyhow--that's for another moment. Point is--and I'm no ordinary Christian--this is stuff we all learned from the cradle. I'll be using Christian doctrinal talking points throughout this whole conversation because that's where I learned this shit. It's also where I learned it was all crap.

I've had a real hard time with this one, cause by now I can usually say, "The point is...." Right now I still can't do that. The whole collection of thoughts in my head begins to ooze its way into the point when I come at it this way. Bear with a little, OK?

Christians say they believe the book that stuff up the page a little came from is the sacrosanct Word of God, equated with the Logos--God on paper, if you will. With apologies to those real Christian human beings in the world, Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit!!!!! If you shitheels really believed one word of the shit in that book, this conversation would be intrinsically inconceivable. See that at the end of that last sentence? PERIOD.

On the other hand, I believe the Bible to be a beautiful collection of fine literature, some of which may be divinely inspired. We have all these cultural heroes, like Gandhi whom I linked to on FB earlier, Jesus, John Lennon ferchristsake. We pay a bunch of lip service out to them then grab a beer and flick on some stupid nonsense on TV, or punch a child, or throw rocks at a cop, or bust a protester. Fuck that, I decided I believe it. Whatever it is.

You may have noticed me carrying on about a new paradigm, money's a bad metaphor, we're all in this together, &c., &c. All that is real, real important to what this is about, but OMG kids! This was a bitch to get off. I'll be hanging flesh on it all as I go, but be patient. what ended up here just now was way different than what I'd meant to do. A writer has to possess a pretty ridiculous quantity of arrogance in the first place, just to have the motivation to sit here pouring all of it out. I mean, I think this tripe I'm typing is valuable enough, and that you all will want to see it--need to see it--to occupy me at 3:30 in the fucking morning. Even worse, here and round about, (get wit' me on Facebook, if you came from somewhere else), I'll be arguing with Hegel, Gandhi, Paul the fuckin' Apostle. Can you believe it? Whatever, I believe the finer points from all those guys. I'll explain everything.

This hasn't been the clarification I'd promised to put up, but it defines some of the questions, I guess. You can have it.

Now don't forget. A little review: It's All Bullshit!!!

Another Lick

Guess I'm on a roll, so--speaking of shit you find lying around outside:

The Pikes Peak region is "semi-arid" and pretty sparse, so far as dinner plate items from Nature's bounty are concerned. "Pioneers", (which of course is proto-Orwellian for "conquerors"), had  rather more game around til they killed it all for the sheer glee of it, so if your caught out now things can be even rougher. To top off the chicken thingy* I used strictly ingredients found outside. Lying around.

Take and harvest a bunch of prickly pears--the fruit are nice and ripe at this very moment! Use a razor sharp knife, and don't take more than half the fruit from a single plant. Thank whomever you like to Thank as you harvest, and be gentle. We caused our Moms enough grief as teens; we don't need to carry on so with our Mother.

Find some other kind of berries or other fruit for variety, anything that's not apt to poison you will do just fine, as will skipping it.

Hunt down some kinda wild mint. There are several varieties around. Keep track of your living stash and you can harvest till the Apocalypse. The shit's like weeds, only tasty.

OK, wild honey. You really can, I promise, find bee trees by following bees. Look for a good field of flowers and be patient with the difficulty of the task. Even if it takes all summer, it's worth it. WATCH OUT FOR BEARS! I'm not joking at all about that one. It's even more important to exercise great care when harvesting, given the delicate position of bees, lately, and their crucial function to the current Manifestation. Also, they might sting you, but that's minor. Use smoke to quiet their anger--if you are serious and find a good tree, it's worthwhile to get hold of a smoker from an apiary supply^. Agave nectar would probably render a more "authentic" version of this, if such a thing exists, but you'll have to figure out how to get it yourself, (let me know). This is strictly a thing of mine, but I can't believe no indigenous gatherer ever worked it out before.

One thing--I used a little lemon juice, both for flavor, and for its marvelous preservative quality. It's not necessary, by any means, but if you want the effect and if you really want to be a purist and go all native and shit, you'll need to sort out a local source of citric acid. Or, duh--it dawns on me the pricklies probably suffice for that, too.

I used the other half of the jalapeno from the chicken thing, too, which I found in it's natural environment at the bottom of a Whole Foods donation box. It's awful tricky to find a wild pepper around here, but not impossible....

Pluck the fuzzies from the pears and seed them. You can blanche and peel them very much more easily, but the skin has half the flavor and even more of the nutrients. Besides, the plucking offers an excuse for sitting around a table with your family without an idiot box blaring inanities, though I recommend blaring some jammin' tunes. Look me up on Facebook and I'll post some for you.

Put  all the ingredients except the honey in an appropriately sized saucepan, add a little water so it don't burn while the juices are coming out, cover, and simmer til you get sick of simmering.

Add honey to taste and use for ice cream, a kind of chutney, or whatever. Mixes well with cream, too, if you're not too aggressive about the process.

Best when built as a family project from top down, side-to-side, and suffused liberally con molto amore!

* http://hipgnosis21.blogspot.com/2011/09/food-jazz.html
^ http://colonialhoneyfarm.webs.com/ "All natural."