I am glad that you were able to google the thoughts i had in quotes from my original post to determine its source. Didn’t feel a cite was necessary for a comment to a blog, but maybe i should have…to satisfy the literary police.

My reply to your comment was original. Yes, my approach is based on methodology used by Objectivist, but I think its especially valid for these types of discussions regarding political ideology. Either way, neither comment “paraphrased” a philosophy. I would suggest you read the article in the link you posted because the author does do a fairly good job of paraphrasing the philosophy.

I have no doubt that you are familar with Objectivism. There is clearly a difference between being familar with something and understanding it. Your reply indicates this.

I never said i cannot accept your definition of “evil”. In fact, I openly asked you to define your premises and use a logical process to contradict anything i said. I don’t claim to know everything, or even state my observations as absolutes. I have merely stated what i hold as good (life) and what i hold as evil (destruction of life). I used the rational process to build upon those premises. Again, find a contradiction in my logic and i am open to consider it. Help me understand. Don’t say I cannot “accept” a premise you have not defined. You are smart. You have the tools to be more persuasive than to use personal attacks and sarcasim….unless of course you feel your position cannot be supported by logic and you must result to a more evasive strategy.

To all conservatives (and especially those who are members of the Republican Party),

Your policies idealistic and unreasonable. You push your conservative Christian views on the rest of us. They are proposed with no consideration of reality, practicality, present or future costs. Just because it sounds good doesn’t make it so. Every penny that our country borrows has to be paid back, either through taxation or inflation. There is no way around it. Yet, you continue to push for policies which will expand our national debt.

It is completely laughable that the 2000 Republican Party Platform—the platform under which our previous President was elected contains the following quote: “Over the past seven years, a shrunken American military has been run ragged by a deployment tempo that has eroded its military readiness. Many units have seen their operational requirements increased four-fold, wearing out both people and equipment….Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness.”

Anyone who disagrees with your policies is slandered as “un-American,” “liberal,” or is told that they “provide comfort to our enemies.” Your policies of statism are barbaric. Your policies of taxation are hurting the poor.

Your policies are schizophrenic. You offer peace as justification for war. You promote the United States as a model of freedom as you authorize the use of torture. You reprimand non-democratically elected foreign leaders on issues of human rights and political prisoners while you revoke human rights and detain political prisoners on soil of the very countries you speak against.

You want to tie us all together into you(r) definition of society: a society where we’re all forced to think with one voice with little to no room for dissent. The want to sacrifice all collective rights of society for your individual right to do what YOU think is best with little regard for alternate points of view. It is not wrong to care for the freedom of foreign countries, it is not always wrong to stay the course, but it is wrong for the government to force people to do so. I don’t want to be tied to anyone. If I choose to help people, let that be my choice. Why should I be forced to pay for the building of other nations I never wanted to destroy? Why should I have to pay for their damages? Why should I be forced to pay for anyone to do anything (except build roads, maintain police and courts etc at home)?

You conveniently ignore data and facts. For example, I have showed that no matter how high or low your citizens wish to be, the government still collects 0% of GDP of currently illegal drugs and that when rehabilitation and opportunity replace incarceration and removal of rights everyone is better off. Yet, for some reason which cannot be explained, you want to punish the users and make the rest of society pay for their capture, prosecution and incarceration and you want to do this by raising taxes. No amount of graphs, facts, or charts can change your minds.

You base your decisions on feelings, ideas, and emotions, rather than logic, rationality, and facts.

You claim to seek freedom and equality for all people, yet you somehow think that this can be accomplished by treating people unequally. For example, no matter how well intentioned, suspension of habeas corpus is unconstitutional as it gives preference to one group over another and removes freedoms without due process.

You openly disregard vast sections of the Constitution of the United States of America. You ignore the 6th Amendment and push for not allowing detainees to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense, failing to realize that if these measures persist, law abiding citizens will suffer the consequences of a nation scarred by the abandonment of its most basic principles.

You ignore the 4th and 10th Amendments and push for greater Federal control over the States and the People. And yet, you refuse to allow the government recognize the right to privacy [a right that is implicit in the constitution when it bars illegal search and seizure and requires consent of the owner of private property to allow for invasion of their homes during times of peace and/or war] for the purposes of allowing illegal searches, seizures and a new era of warrant-less monitoring of private citizens. You have even gone so far as requiring corporations, those same entities you wish to minimally regulate, to hand over records of their customers for the continuation of your own self-interest.

You cant have it both ways, either follow the Constitution, or don’t. Instead, you follow it and refer to it when it is convenient and ignore it the rest of the time.

Refusing to approach the current system of health care has become such a quagmire. It is unnecessarily expensive and inefficient. While research may not have been stifled, practical methods of prevention have been abandoned due to increasingly oppressive costs. Furthermore, the entire basis for insurance is for several people to pay and reap the rewards of their premiums with services when they become necessary. That has been the rationale of forcing a person, say who doesn’t have a bad driving record and is willing to take the risks of no insurance to purchase insurance in order to protect others who may or may not be safe behind the wheel. Shouldn’t people be allowed to at least have a modicum of access to advanced care services that are not exorbitantly expensive to make them exclusive to only 1% of society?

How can you possibly oppose free trade? Free trade is the natural extension of trade. By trade I mean the buying and selling of goods and services. By natural extension, I mean that on the lowest level, trade exists between individuals and that free trade only means extending this practice to allow individuals and businesses from other nations to engage in this practice with individuals and businesses from our nation. Free trade benefits all. It allows the best quality good at the lowest cost to be sold on the open market to any person who is willing to pay for it. It does not open itself to protectionist ideals which raise prices at home regardless of the impact on American workers, especially in the manufacturing sector.

You want the government to solve all of your problems. Your policies expand the government run safety net and take away incentives to take risks. It is not the job of the government to provide support to corporations because someone deemed them “too big to fail” regardless of whether the CEO’s belong to your country club. Who is to pay for these things?

I support stem cell research, but you have serious moral issues with it. I don’t understand how one party can be so insensitive as to refuse funding to potentially world-changing scientific research. If it were up to you, we would refuse funding for any research that promoted anything other than divine creationism. Let private labs do their own research if they choose to attempt to discredit evolution. We have the greatest scientists in the world. Lets set them free to do research, rather than placing them under government supervision.

Liberals aren’t your enemy either. You have expropriated the term liberal and used it for yourself. The term liberal was not used to describe people whom you believe are against you, in fact, it was used to describe people like you. A liberal was known as someone who supported individual rights, civil liberties, property rights, free trade, free markets, and a gold currency standard. Liberal is a relative term, it does not and cannot exist in a vacuum. Something can only be liberal in comparison to something else. While we’re at it, you stole the word Federalism as well. A term that used to mean a strong federal government, somehow you’ve twisted it into New Federalism meaning states’ rights and that’s just plain damn confusing.

For the vast span of human history, the people were at the will of the government or those who are/have been in control of it. The government alone decided whether to provide for or withhold the needs of the people as it wished. It was only when classical liberal ideas like those listed above entered into the minds of the governments were people truly free to pursue their own interests. This freedom led to the progress that has been achieved in the past 250 years.

The United States of America has never been a truly free society in the history of mankind, but it has come closer than most. Our society stressed individual and property rights (even when the property in question was of a human nature) and in a relatively short span of time became an advanced nation. It is no accident that human history stagnated for so long when governments were only interested in themselves. It is no accident that it was 1,000 years after the fall of Rome—well into the Renaissance Age (a relatively free society) before standards of living rose to what they had under the Roman Empire. Just as it is no accident that we teeter on the edge of Rome’s legacy in our post decadence world created by the corporate excesses you promote.

The technological progress that we have seen in the last two plus centuries is wholly due to the fact that technology tends to build upon itself and private developers are able to financially capitalize on government funded research (i.e. GPS, communications, space research, etc).

And yet, so called conservatives continue to push for the very ideas, programs, and controls that are incompatible with continued progress.

You Republicans are proud to be a part of “The Party of Abraham Lincoln.” If Lincoln were alive today, he would spit in your face and denounce you in the strongest terms possible. Lincoln was a man who absolutely loved the idea of a strong central government. He is the man who said “Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure,” adding, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

Prophetic words.

[If you are a conservative, don’t think I’m picking on you and leaving liberals alone--tomorrow I'll be writing about liberals and Democrats]

As an advocate from the Commonwealth I am,

Le Hawk

We clearly define “evil” differently. I can accept this. I am sorry that you cannot.

Sincerely,

An ignorant, uninformed, mentally incapable, logic-abandoning, evil supporting person.

P.S. You should cite your sources. Specifically, when you copy and paste from this guy’s site: http://ellis14.wordpress.com/

A policy, being an inanimate object, can easily be reduced to its fundamental determining attribute. Through the process of logical identification, a policy that holds death and sacrifice as its ultimate goal is evil – if we assume life as the fundamental alternative “good”. I can confidently say a policy is or is not evil.

Being a conscious creature with the ability to achieve rational thought, I will not jump to any conclusions in saying that you, as an entity, are evil. You will have to help me determine. You fall into one of two categories. 1) Ignorant of you support of evil – i.e. you are merely uninformed of the nature of the ideas you champion, are mentally incapable of the reasoning process, or are unwilling to apply reason to challenge the ideas which some “powers that be” told you are righteous. 2) Are guilty of overtly supporting evil – i.e. you consciously apply the laws of causality and logic (non-contradictory identification) to fully support policy set on the foundation of evil – thus hate man, life, and hold destruction as your ultimate ends.

I’m not to say a person is evil or not. But, you may be able to tell me if you are or are not guilty of overtly supporting evil.

I must again state – If my conclusions are shown to be invalid by objective rational standards, I will admit it and change my opinion. Find a contradiction in my logic and we can discuss.

The problem is that most people hold their beliefs in a vacuum with no reference to reality….

If my conclusions are shown to be invalid by objective rational standards, I will admit it and change my opinion. Democrats get so emotional with their arguments they actively avoid facts and don’t want to even consider the logic (or lack thereof) of the position they are supporting. Of course I don’t want people to suffer, and I don’t think benevolence and kindness are evil either. Democratic policies are evil because they hurt everyone on all sides of the equation. No amount of good intentions will change that.

“We all need a philosophy. We all have one, whether we realize it or not. The question is: is my philosophy logical, rational, self-consistent, complete, and founded upon reality? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, the philosophy is useless. The problem is that most people hold their beliefs in a vacuum with no reference to reality. They have no philosophical basis on which to draw conclusions so they hold a mass of opinions and notions together without noticing that most of them contradict the others.”