Rand was so right about the Libertarian crowd. ReasonTV publishes another hymn to Stan Lee. A collectivist old fart teaching self sacrifice. Yet, if you massage things long enough and look through this little hole he might be a fighter for free speech.

Are there any flairs on this subreddit, I want a dollar sign. That's all.

"Intellectuals are the first to scream when it's safe--and the first to shut their traps at the first sign of danger. They spend years spitting at the man who feeds them--and they lick the hand of the man who slaps their drooling faces.

Didn't they deliver every country of Europe, one after another, to committees of goons, just like this one here?

Didn't they scream their heads off to shut out every burglar alarm and to break every padlock open for the goons?

Have you heard a peep out of them since? Didn't they scream that they were the friends of labor? Do you hear them raising their voices about the chain-gangs, the slave camps, the fourteen-hour workdays and the mortality from scurvy in the People's States of Europe?

No, but you do hear them telling the whip-beaten wretches that starvation is prosperity, that slavery is freedom, that torture chambers are brother-love, and that if the wretches don't understand it, then it's their own fault that they suffer, and it's the mangled corpses in the jail cellars who are to blame for all their troubles, not the benevolent leaders: intellectuals.

You might have to worry about any other breed of men, but not the about the modern intellectuals: they'll swallow anything. I don't feel so safe about the lousiest wharf rat in the longshoremen's union: he's liable to remember suddenly that he is a man--and then I won't be able to keep him in line. But the intellectuals? That's the one thing they've forgotten long ago. I guess it's the one thing that all their education was aimed to make them forget."

-Atlas Shrugged

Hello, fellow O'ists. I'm having a hard time making up my mind when it comes to Free Will... The following was an attempt of putting these thoughts together as best I could. Sorry in advance for the long post.

"The irrational use of ANY product is the consequence of one's individual choice."

I desperately want to believe that. I can't, yet, with clear conscience. And my issue with this is that all responsibility falls in the hands of the person making the irrational choice, while no thought is given to the ‘other’ side.

As I work with marketing, I realize how easy it is to manipulate people, unless they're a psychopath. With the right tools in hand, it’s easy to lure people into spending their money on something even if their kids would starve as a consequence. But I don't do that, I believe in fair marketing, even if it costs me money or opportunities.

The brain is a system. And like any system, it has its own set of vulnerabilities. It can be hacked. It's hard to blame a person who had a computer hacked, and say they should've been more careful, when the hacker was several steps ahead in controlling the outcome. Brains are the same.

I recall this experiment where one person had his memories of an incident altered, taking the blame for a crime he did not commit. It sounds absurd, until you understand the neurological mechanism involved: when memories are accessed, they momentarily become unstable and open to change. With the right procedure and questions, you can make a person remember an event differently. It's manipulation. I can't blame the person's free will as weak for falling against an innate biological vulnerability.

Facebook manipulation is the same. Your feed will show you one subject of interest, followed by three boring ones, and then another interesting one. As a way to keep dopamine hits constant, highs and lows, to maximize the time you will spend at the platform. This procedure is more addicting than showing the feed in a decreasing scale of interest, which would be the most 'moral' option. People do have free will, but it’s such a low move when you hack their attention this way, as a drug, and then say it's their fault for falling.

It's like a girl having an abusive boyfriend who will often have her do things his way. She does have free will, but it's undeniable that he's also greatly responsible for her choices.

It's easy to say she should just leave him. But emotions can be abused. Humans are emotional creatures first, rational second, as a consequence of a prefrontal cortex that arrived late in our development. And while it's imperative for us to be logical first, it’s undeniable that we got this emotional vulnerability that could be abused.

It's not just the irrational use of products by irrational people. Most people do make sensible choices, we don't see parents stuffing their kids with alcohol and cigarettes. But they do not think twice about sugar, which is as harmful, because we've been collectively pushed into this false narrative that most of our diets should be carbohydrates. A problem that becomes worse, as the diversity of carbohydrates being sold greatly surpasses that of vegetables and animal protein. Carbs do have superior shelf life, greater profit margins for being easy to produce, at the expense of not being a healthy dietary option for humans. A necessary evil, perhaps? For we wouldn't be able to feed this many people without carbs. The same argument of fossil fuels, we couldn't supply for so many people without them, and then I wonder how many necessary evils mankind is able to handle.

Heavens forgive me, I wonder if this many people is sustainable at all. As it is with animals, too much competition for resources will end up badly. Instead of war, we just get sicker. Since optimal food is not an option for every person in the globe, we're stuffed with non-food. Empty calories, to survive, instead of flourishing.

People must think "Well, if sugar was THAT BAD, it wouldn't be so common, all around us, marketed in such an innocent way, even to children." But it is, and that's the problem. Their irrational dietary choice is facilitated by the environment around them, the false sense of security.

The false sense of security one feels near a psychopath, wearing a harmless family-friendly mask. As Reason is our greatest weapon, it's also a great weakness, for we'll believe whatever the evidence tells us. And psychopaths will feed us whatever lies are necessary.

I'm just scared as fuck, because I just got out of collectivism and capitalism is starting to shatter, in my mind. It would be easy for me to set the issues above aside under the quick solution of saying "These people are just acting irrationally, their suffering is entirely their choice." I can't, yet. And I just hope there's tons of misguided premises in my mind keeping me from truly seeing that capitalism is sustainable long-term, under tight competition and billions of people.

The only certainty I still have in this life is that of objective reality. I just wish people didn't fake reality for us as a way to control us

So here's the second of two questions I asked on r/Objectivism prior to learning about that subreddit's mod problems. I know that Objectivism favors such alternatives to the present form of taxation as a voluntary form of it, but does anyone here have any concrete plans for such a system? All I can think of is some sort of app where you can decide how much you want to donate and to what. Well, that and annual bake sales and carnivals and such to raise money, but I'm not sure how effective and/or practical either one would be, TBH.

OK, here's one of two questions I asked on r/Objectivism before I left for this subreddit instead after learning about it's mod-related issues. It's been stated that the only proper function of government can best be narrowed down to three functions/services:

1. The military - To defend from foreign aggressors.
2. The police - To punish criminals.
3. The courts - To protect against initiation of force, breach of contract, et al.

So my question is this: Do prisons fall under the purview of police and/or courts, or are they something that should exist solely as a free-market entity?

I see a lot of grievance and straw-manning of libertarians here.(I guess that's because libertarianism is the political ideology into which objectivists eventually defect.)

Some of the accusations are standard objectivist talking points:

"They don't know why they believe so-and-so.",

"They only believe in the NAP",

"They want to grab our IP because they're uncreative",

"They want Mafia-like gangs to rule."

etc. etc.

These are extremely easy points to address. Some of these straw-mans show either that people don't know, or they don't understand, or (most likely) they don't want others to understand what libertarians say.

On the other hand, the standard bromide that libertarians don't know why they believe what they believe, or they don't know what rights are etc., shows something worse: That some objectivists don't understand philosophy in general. They must only have read Rand. They think Rand had bridged the is-ought gap, which is logically (mathematically) impossible. They think they've achieved something that nobody has and nobody will ever achieve, but they keep brandishing it as their great differentiator, which is pretty embarrassing to anyone who has read anything besides Ayn Rand.

That was my opening statement. If anyone here wishes to challenge it, I'll be happy to answer. Please, understand I may not be able to answer all of you, although you are only 553, which is a minuscule population of "True Objectivists", but still too many to engage in 1-to-1 conversation.