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Do you have the actual text that you are referring to?
I know, I know. I should go look it up myself.
Article III, Section I
Tenure:
The Constitution provides that judges "shall hold their Offices during good Behavior." The term "good behavior" is interpreted to mean that judges may serve for the remainder of their lives, although they may resign or retire voluntarily. A judge may also be removed by impeachment and conviction by congressional vote (hence the term good behavior); this has occurred fourteen times. Three other judges, Mark W. Delahay,[5] George W. English,[6] and Samuel B. Kent,[7] chose to resign rather than go through the impeachment process.
From the lib perspective, just being a conservative is bad behavior.
I think that the 17th amendment is a significant factor in the corruption of the Senate.
Repeal of a few significant laws and amendments passed or ratified in 1913 would scale back considerably the corruption and expansion of statist federal government. Without those laws and constitutional amendments being passed America would be completely different and, imo, Americans would be much more free today.
100% agree.
So I would say the principles from which our various branches and functions of government proceed are what define good behavior, or rather the philosophers and legal scholars who preceeded the judges and politicians (along with any of the latter who qualify).
Without your mind, you are nothing. And without the minds to move us forward, we as a people are nothing.
I think that is one reason AR hasnt really caught on with the public, even though her thinking was brilliant.
AS was written on a lower level (EXCEPT for that speech by Galt, which I have to say would have had more effect if it was written in a more understandable way for the average person.
Branden attempted to bring the philosophy down to where the average person lives, and for that I applaud him. I really didnt get into who did what to whom relative to Ayn Rand, so I dont pass judgment on that at all. I did find that his writings did help average people to understand objectivist principles on a more personal level.
It is only from perception and in "language" that people live or function at all. The only battle is whether we concede our world to mediocrity-worshippers who would burn or toss aside such literary monuments without a second thought.
You don't fight for a value by renouncing it or setting it aside for even one moment or momentary "gain." Not if your life is your standard of value.
Now tell me honestly, do you actually perceive any gains by the wishy-washy approach, can you point to anything that could count as real success in reversing the trend toward totalitarian statism?
All is I see is people Going Backwards (Depeche Mode)
We are not there yet
We have not evolved
We have no respect
We have lost control
We're going backwards
Ignoring the realities
Going backwards
Are you counting all the casualties?
We are not there yet
Where we need to be
We are still in debt
To our insanities
We're going backwards
Turning back our history
Going backwards
Piling on the misery
We can track it all with satellites
See it all in plain sight
Watch men die in real time
But we have nothing inside
We feel nothing inside
We are not there yet
We have lost our soul
The course has been set
We're digging our own hole
We're going backwards
Armed with new technology
Going backwards
To a caveman mentality
We can emulate on consoles
Killings we can control
With senses that have been dulled
Because there's nothing inside
We feel nothing inside
We feel nothing inside
(We feel nothing, nothing inside)
We feel nothing inside
(We feel nothing, nothing inside)
We feel nothing inside
(We feel nothing, nothing inside)
We feel nothing inside
(We feel nothing, nothing inside)
We feel nothing inside
(We feel nothing, nothing inside)
Because there's nothing inside
Because there's nothing inside
Songwriters: Martin Gore
Going Backwards lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
https://youtu.be/B5oO0PT_-Ao
I didnt vote for Trump to reverse the march to collectivism. I voted for him because I thought he could slow down the speed of that march. He has done that, IMHO.
I see the march to collectivism as the result of some sort of unstoppable force that appears to be rooted in some aspect of human nature that is not being addressed by AR.
This country will continue down the path outlined in AS until it is destroyed. Maybe then people will be willing to listen to reason.
Atlas Shrugged launched a revolution, only people by and large have been too stupid or cowardly to wake up to the fact. It wasn't intended as a worse-case scenario any more than Patrick Henry's speech or Thomas Paine's essays were: they said plainly and clearly that the revolution was here and now.
Only because people woke up and took note was there the possibility for a Republic of Freedom in the first place. Today, people were not ready to wake up and took comfort they could write Rand off as fiction and the Dark Ages spawned by Plato's fictional symposiums as the only lasting reality.
Well, time is running out, has run it, is running backward. And still the endless quibbling over principles or "practicality."
Your biological cynicism is not unlike Dr. Robert Stadler's, to whom (among others) Galt says:
"When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason -- as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no 'right' to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind." (AS, 1021)
Earlier, she says: "The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour or issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival -- so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" (AS, 1012)
To concretize your thinking on the fundamental issue of free will, I would strongly encourage you to listen to "How to Understand Free Will" by Charles Tew: https://youtu.be/W0wM0nJ4UBI
Also, the recent 2018 book by Dr. Ed Locke: "The Illusion of Determinism: Why Free Will Is Real and Causal" offers the most comprehensive study of the issue and thoroughly refutes every one of the arguments arrayed against human choice or freedom: https://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Deter...
If you persist in maintaining that there is "some sort of unstoppable force," then I would suggest you stop doing anything to stop it, get out of the way and let it take over completely. (After all, if it were true that a person's mind could actually be changed by sticking a gun in their face, there would be no argument against force).
But if you decide you are wrong (as I maintain) then I hope you will join the revolution that officially began precisely 61 years ago tomorrow with the publication of Atlas Shrugged on October 10, 1957.
And then we can stop wasting time thinking or talking about Trump or any of the other losers going down in the same old ship of fools as has chased and "weathered" the storm for millennia. Then those sailors who are truly seaworthy can set sail for Atlantis instead.
The other argument is that we only like perhaps 80 years, not nearly long enough to stop and reverse collectivism in this country. My selfish interest is to live in as good a country as I can during the time I am alive. We have already spend 61 years essentially achieving nothing but watching a further slide into collectivism. I can see it taking generations from now to reverse this process. I dont have that time, and I doubt you do either. I dont want to live as venezuelans are, and we are headed full force to that. The next 50 years are going to be hell, and I would rather slow it down so I have a better time while I am still alive.
Ask yourself why things only get worse. Then go back and look at your own arguments for going along in the hopes that you can slow down the corrosion long enough to avoid taking a stand, or sticking your neck out. You're a luckless pedestrian on a frozen train, waiting for someone to "do something."
Please listen to the video I recommended on Free Will. It might not slow things down. It might, if fact, speed you up instead.
For the same reason I do not mix cronyism with capitalism, as non-absolutes on both "sides" are also so fond of doing.
A liberal can only be an advocate for individual liberty from any of a myriad of possible forms of statism that have but one thing in common: force, making each and all illiberal. So if you must, go with the ironic designation: illiberal "liberals."
(It's certainly Orwellian enough).
Most people look at things on a relative basis. Taxes are lower with regime #1 than regime #2. If they keep thinking that way, eventually they will choose regime #n that has NO taxes.
I voted for Trump and would do so again, because he is better than the alternative in a number of ways. He is NOT intellectually consistently Objectivist in his thinking, nor would he ever have been elected in our culture today if he were Objectivist . Our choice was Trump OR Hildebeast. Next time it might be Trump vs Hillary again. If someone more rational than Trump ran in 2020, I would vote that way.
There are no pure or impure "objectivists." The are Objectivists and non- or anti- Objectivists. And it doesn't lose people who are not already lost (presenting it any "other way" is what loses them).
Most people don't "look at things" at all. Most people look not to things but to "most people."
Which way you attempt to move on a slippery slope of the kind you present makes no difference in the end (it's an issue of "a little bit of poison").
Trump, any more than Mr. Thompson, isn't any kind of Objectivist (never thought I'd be offended at it being spelt with a capital "O," but in this context I am, deeply). Had he been other than, at best, an Atlas who refuses to shrug, then he never would have run to "expose" anything (other than his own rank hypocrisy).
Given the full moral and political context, I would say there is no one less rational than Trump. He is the traitor keeping things together only enough to deliver us ultimately into the hands of our enemy at whose enduring patience he temporarily "rules."
The Spelling correction in my computer put a capital O on Objectivism for some reason.
I have no objection to you being very precise in thinking at all. I am just suggesting that outside of very limited intellectual circles, people will be turned off or just bored by what you say. If you want to convince people, I think one needs to start from where THEY live.
But far worse is the pretender to true premises unconcerned or positively (pragmatically) opposed to acting on such principles consistently.
It is only our supposed "friends" that are in a position to do real and lasting harm to our cause to that degree that they do not understand what it means to think in principle, or who are unable therefore to act consistently on principle.
As Ayn Rand famously observed, "The evil is not consistent and does not want to be consistent."
"The evil is delighted to compromise."
And no, I am not a second-hander whose chief concern is others. Those who are able to understand might be of some value to the revolution. Those who are not able or willing can only get in the way.
My advice to you is to stop worrying about other people altogether and focus instead exclusively on your own grasp of reality. If you see for yourself, you will save a lot of time otherwise spent in efforts to indirectly persuade yourself through others' unaccountable "agreement."
That's why there can be no compromise with the evil, the willfully irrational or subjective. All one can do is speak up loud and proud with anyone remotely open to reason, and encourage them to do the same.
In addition to universal principles of constructive/destructive interference in nature, another natural principle that can apply to human action is the ripple effect with which patterns of interference combine, adding to or subtracting from the cumulative effect.
Thinking in principle means activating your mind through a conscious training process or praxis for building one's readiness to deal with issues or actions that effect one's own quality of life, one's own flourishing. So it's a virtuous circle or spiral.
It matters not what one chooses from the literary cannon of liberty amassed from Ancient Greece, the Dawn of the Enlightenment to the present. But passively quibbling on the sidelines of history will make no difference to you or anybody.
If you're open to being radicalized then pick up a copy of The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the World Are Going Out by Leonard Peikoff. He begins by recommending other books that will prepare you to comprehend what he's saying, and chapters you will find accessible even if you're not familiar with the earlier books.
AS launched the revolution. DIM gave those who have grasped the philosophy of John Galt our marching orders, a survey of the hostile terrain and the cultural combatants that populate the landscape.
Endless concretes will swamp your understanding unless you first grasp the philosophic fundamental, which you will only grasp if you know how to think in principle (another useful book is Binswanger's "How We Know.")
Or we can just argue endlessly back and forth, me feeling like a hypocrite for wasting my time advertising a revolution no one here is prepared to join or even comprehend.
To them I say Good Luck, and So Long.
I'll stop wasting everyone's time and let honest minds come to me, to my posts, not theirs.
Now I happen to think patent infidelity to the Constitution ought to be grounds for such removal. But obviously those who actually serve in Congress have never agreed with that.
Until today.
Now you have the opposite problem. You see someone threatening to bring Articles of Impeachment against someone for what they regard as a "high crime and misdemeanor" long before he held any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States, or even was eligible to hold any such office.
Based upon recent experience I don't expect rationality or ethics from US con-gress critters of either major party.
If there was any way for people outside the con-gress to bring charges against members of congress who have violated their constitutional oaths, I doubt that any member of con-gress could survive. They all deserve to be tarred and feathered and deported.
They all survive only because of the ignorance and stupidity of the voters.