No one is personally attacking you. Your false and libelous speculations about other people's motives, thoughts and actions are contrary to fact, smears based on your own emotions. You lack objectivity. The kinds of very personalized attacks you are posting don't belong on this or any other civilized forum at all.

"Physician, heal thyself."

Please consult the guideline for posting here and stop your personal attacks and paranoid speculations about other people's motives. Blarman could not be more wrong.

As the self-appointed "exemplar", I would ask why you do nothing to clean up your own attitude before accusing others. You're a whited sepulchre. You have no problems casting aspersions of others yet pretending that you are above any such. You lie only to yourself.

If you aren't interested in my opinions, why did you go to a six-month-old post and specifically respond to mine by manufacturing an argument which didn't exist? "Methinks thou doth protest too much."

I am a paid member of this forum for four years now - something you can't claim despite all your self-titled "Objectivist" leanings. Put your money where your mouth is or you are nothing but a hypocrite.

Don't like what I have to say? Ignore my posts. There's a little "Hide" link that makes it very easy. My objectivity and relevance are in that 18,000+ ranking - and I didn't have to vote myself up to get there.

Stop your personal lecturing and speculating about my personal life and motives. You know nothing about it. Your snarling personal accusations and insinuations are false and do not belong on a civilized forum. I am not interested in your psychologizing and personal feuding, let alone the irrelevant rambling rationalizing about international linguistics and "rabbit holes" trying to justify it. You confuse "hostility" with the conceptual content of posts you do not understand. Your imagination is not objectivity. You speculate, personalize, and spread malicious gossip. It is not "arrogant" and "hostile" to reject your personal attacks on this forum. You lack objectivity and relevance. Knock it off.

I find meaning and learning in knowing how things came to be: in the history of cultures both my own and others. If you choose to overlook these opportunities, that's up to you. Whether or not I am objective isn't up to you to decide, however. The presumption and arrogance of such a statement should be so obvious. Any kind of real objectivity wouldn't attempt to manufacture a non-existent controversy - especially on a six-month-old conversation.

There is this thing in psychology called projection where insecure people tend to see in others the very faults present in themselves. You have it and it adversely affects how you deal with others. You are not as superior as you think you are.

Hint: the English language is the biggest hodgepodge of other languages which exists. Very few words are originally derived from actual English - most are imported from other languages, including many Greek and Latin words, but interspersed heavily with German and French (as well as several others). Any assertion that English is some kind of master language will get you laughed out of any anthropology or linguistics department in the world, but you're welcome to go down that rabbit hole if you really want to...

Truth is truth. If you want to be objective: start with yourself. If you want to view me as hostile to you, that's your dream world. I don't waste my time hating other people. It's not worth the emotional investment as there's no payback. If argument and hostility is all you have to sustain your life, I truly do pity you.

In all seriousness there is a better way. It involves coming to grips with reality: that you can be reasonable and hospitable even with those you disagree with. You can step down off that pedestal you put yourself on and treat everyone else the way you want to be treated: as equals rather than supposed inferiors. I know it can be a tough thing to do, but the dividends are real. Try it - you might be surprised at the results.

Stop your hostile personal attacks in your speculative misrepresentations and condescending pronouncements and instructions on my life. You are dead wrong. You lack objectivity.

The reason why Objectivism rejects Pragmatism has nothing to do with what you wrote. We don't speak ancient Greek. The term Pragmatism has been established philosophically for over a century and came from Kant. That is not a "manufactured disagreement for the sake of arguing". You do not understand Ayn Rand's philosophy or the people you are so hostile to.

That people can change and alter words to mean something other than what they originally meant (take liberalism for example) does not alter the original meaning. And studying where things came from and how they have changed along the way is incredibly valuable. The process of change is just as important to understand as the change itself, and possibly more so.

On another note, why reply to post six months old? Why manufacture disagreements for the sake of arguing with others? Is that your only joy in life - to try to make yourself feel good by putting others down? If so, you deceive yourself. Peace comes internally as a result of knowing you are doing what is right.

Pragmatism is not a "morph" and doesn't mean "compromise" or "identifying with the real and tangible". It is the name of the philosophy of William James and Charles Peirce, beginning in the late 19th century, and their followers, including John Dewey (who called it Instrumentalism), throughout the 20th century. That is what Objectivism opposes, not being "practical". It's about the content, not etymology.

Pragmatism dominated American philosophy, beginning with the entire department at Harvard when Harvard was American philosophy. It came from the European philosophy of Kant, Hegel and the anti-conceptual Empiricists. The term itself came from Kant. It has dominated American thought in all realms with its emphasis truth is what "works" and opposition to principle on principle. Trump is a typical product of it.

Most of the ideas are great. Four are not. Making (means use force) health insurance plans cover pre-existing conditions encourages people to wait until the house is on fire then purchase insurance. It severely reduces the pool if you can buy insurance when you discover you are having a heart attack. Eliminate Health Savings Accounts. The government will do what it is doing now, monitor your account and take what you don't spend. Eliminate Medicade. Government involvement in any production or consumption of any product cannot be controlled and cannot be made to work in a free market. Medicare should not exist for the same reason. I have paid 10's of thousands of dollars into to this program then when I retired they want another $200 a month for very minimal coverage! Where did the money go that I paid in all those years. A scam of this nature operated in the free market would be punished.

Based on what Trump is going through at present, I doubt if we'll ever see such reforms. Yes, I would like to see them happen, but there is no way they will, except incrementally. Even then, as administrations swing from left to right and back, the possibility seems remote.

lol. That's why I find it so funny when people say they are pragmatists (or accuse others of so being). Whether or not they are right so often depends on their perception. ;)

I agree completely with your assessment on pragmatists. It has become not about what is real, but about what has the appearance of being real. +1.

Of course I have just called myself a pragmatist by my first comment about lowering the patent timetable... Oh jees... Since we live in a world that tends to constantly lean towards Socialism/Communism, I guess we have to be pragmatic in order to slow down the progression. If we don't get a handle on health care costs, then we will become socialist sooner than later.

No doubt he is a narcissist. Let's hope he measures his narcissism by "results" rather than by just wanting to be right with his first ideas.

The pragmatist question would probably be a great new thread, as it is definitely something that gets thrown around both positively and negatively with objectivism. My biggest problem with pragmatism is that it fully involves an evolutionary use of thought. That is the whole premise. In order for capitalism to be successful, we need stability in rules and laws. We can't change the rules just because someone is winning and some are losing. As long as all rules apply to all people exactly the same, then fairness exists by definition. Pragmatists like to alter the rules as they go to try to level the playing field if there is a perceived imbalance. When they do this, it can create a new imbalance the opposite direction. Pragmatism creates a seesaw of what is seen as truth and reality. Truth and reality do not change, only perceptions change. Pragmatists tend to attempt to alter perceptions.

My 2 cents.

I won't dare to speak for Trump. I'll wait to see. The way his television show went and how he conducted his campaigns dealt very little with being open to other ideas. In most ways he was just as narcissistic as Obama, he just held to different values.

I think what's funny is that the original Greek for "pragmatikos" or pragmatic is from the root "pragma" meaning a real thing. Being pragmatic means being a realist dealing with real things. I would think that Objectivists would identify heartily with being all about what is real and tangible but I think that the word pragmatic has been morphed into meaning compromise - a notion that was never present in the original word.

Haha! You know the funny thing, I actually believe Trump may be like that in some respects. He acts like he knows everything, but when presented with problems his idea may cause, I think he alters his decisions. Let's hope anyway...

While changing our minds can certainly be beneficial in many cases when new evidence presents itself, I would never want to be regarded as a "pragmatist".

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.”
― Albert Einstein

If all people were willing to change their minds when presented with more information, we'd have a much better world. I applaud you wholeheartedly for being more concerned with good policy than any preconceptions. Can we please elect more people to office like you?!?

Start with people accepting that being provided healthcare is not some natural, individual or God given right.
(And neither is being provided slaves)

a conservative who gets it...unlike Trump with his replacement nonsense...

And that is why solving the healthcare "crisis" would not be a good job for me. My ignorance to the intricacies of the drug market is outstanding.

Well said.

I'm going to disagree simply by giving you the actual timeline of a drug under the current system. My brother worked for a company who managed drug trials, so I'm operating from a pretty firm foundation here based on my extensive discussions with him about the matter.

When a drug is first discovered in the laboratory, the firm files a patent which lays out the structure of the drug chemically. That means that from the date the patent application is filed, every single one of a company's competitors have access to what the drug is, what ailment it targets, and the chemical makeup - all for nothing. The only thing they have to do is figure out a way to mass-produce it. And the patent only lasts seventeen years.

Now, while all those competitors are figuring out how to mass-produce generic knock-offs, the filing company now has to go through an 11-year FDA vetting process of clinical trials in three stages: animal trials, limited human trials, extensive human trials. Each stage takes time and literally hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not atypical for the trial costs of medication to exceed $1 billion - and that's besides the research and development price tag which also commonly runs $1 billion.

Now assuming that they get to the end and the FDA signs off on the drug, they now have approximately five to six years left to market the drug and recoup their costs before the generic competition destroys their margins and their hopes of breaking even - let alone turning a profit. Add to this the fact that most drugs are now specialty drugs which target rare or very specific diseases drastically limiting their pool of prospective clients and you begin to see the true picture. I think that the patent coverage should extend for seventeen years after the FDA issues its approval/disapproval so as to give the developer more time to gain back their investment and enabling them to charge lower prices in the meantime.

Rep Jim Jordan appeared on MSNBC to advocate that the House first simply send to Trump the same bill Obama vetoed.

I am also aware that Rand Paul has presented an alternative plan, as have at least two others in the House. The problem is that these don't have the House Leadership stamp of approval and are being held up in Committee.

It's got a lot of my favorites in it. HIPAA is a major villian. But a variation on #4 Streamline the FDA would be to remove the phrase "and effective" from the mission. If you must have an FDA (and pretty much everyone except those of us here thinks you do) restrict it to verifying safety. Once it's safe, then it's the market's job to determine it's effective.