A Rand Rant

[Bill Mattocks]

Oh, for God's sake. I'm afraid when discussing self sacrifice, even real cases become a metaphor.:ultracool
Sean

You can take it to extremes to illustrate the obverse, though.

If self-sacrifice for one's chums is a good thing, when if one should become marooned in a lifeboat, one should immediately look for a way to off oneself, with the idea being that one's pals could have a bit of a picnic on one's edible bits. Yet in cases where the horrible has happened, it seems most have gone rather unwillingly into the stew pot.

If I think about it some, I can probably come up with justification for self-sacrifice in any number of ways. From selling my possessions and giving them all to charity - which Jesus did urge, as I recall - to donating various organs that I possess in duplicate to actually self-destructing to avoid continuing to burden the earth with my various polluting ways.

Nature urges self-preservation, and intelligence urges that self-preservation be balanced with the preservation of the society that supports that to which we have become accustomed and prefer. There is little found in nature that urges self-sacrifice, lemmings to the contrary.

 

[Bill Mattocks]

One would just have to make the assumption you weren't pushing your child into the other lanes of traffic, or off a cliff, into a woodchipper, or what ever else you can come up with.
Sean

I believe that is what I said. My thought would be to gather said malfunctioning child into an arm and continue on at great velocity with him, using my own senses and brain to attempt to do the thinking for both of us, since I had apparently raised an imbecile, to wander out in front of a truck like that.

 

[Touch Of Death]

You can take it to extremes to illustrate the obverse, though.

If self-sacrifice for one's chums is a good thing, when if one should become marooned in a lifeboat, one should immediately look for a way to off oneself, with the idea being that one's pals could have a bit of a picnic on one's edible bits. Yet in cases where the horrible has happened, it seems most have gone rather unwillingly into the stew pot.

If I think about it some, I can probably come up with justification for self-sacrifice in any number of ways. From selling my possessions and giving them all to charity - which Jesus did urge, as I recall - to donating various organs that I possess in duplicate to actually self-destructing to avoid continuing to burden the earth with my various polluting ways.

Nature urges self-preservation, and intelligence urges that self-preservation be balanced with the preservation of the society that supports that to which we have become accustomed and prefer. There is little found in nature that urges self-sacrifice, lemmings to the contrary.

Lemmings are not suicidal, they just choose bad leaders sometimes.
Sean

 

[elder999]

Oh, for God's sake. I'm afraid when discussing self sacrifice, even real cases become a metaphor.:ultracool
Sean

Nope. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

 

[Touch Of Death]

Nope. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

You get 20 points if you can tell me which member of Pink Floyd sang that song; hint, its a trick question. I'll be keeping those twenty points no matter how you answer.
Sean

 

[granfire]

Nope. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

And sometimes it's a Horse

 

[elder999]

You get 20 points if you can tell me which member of Pink Floyd sang that song; hint, its a trick question. I'll be keeping those twenty points no matter how you answer.
Sean

If that was Have a Cigar you're referring to, it wasn't sung by a member of Pink Floyd at all, but some folk singer.

Remember, I live for little factoids like that:

 

[Sukerkin]

I believe that is what I said. My thought would be to gather said malfunctioning child into an arm and continue on at great velocity with him, using my own senses and brain to attempt to do the thinking for both of us, since I had apparently raised an imbecile, to wander out in front of a truck like that.

:chuckles: As a matter of fact, my father did just that for me when I was maybe three years old. The good hiding I got for that particular stupidity was so monumental that I remember to this day :lol:.

 

[Sukerkin]

"Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar.
You're gonna go far, you're gonna fly high,
You're never gonna die, you're gonna make it if you try;they're gonna love you."

Most definitely Pink Floyd but sung by Roy Harper I believe?

 

[elder999]

I do not think we have enough data to argue nature or nurture in this sense. .

Why not? She did:

Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice.

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.


Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An “instinct” is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it.
-Ayn Rand, Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged

 

[Touch Of Death]

That's the same guy who wrote "The Black Cloud Of Islam".
"What Kind of God can this be anyway?
That you've got to stop and pray to him five times a day..."


I'm surprised it was never a hit. LOL
Sean

 

[elder999]

That's the same guy who wrote "The Black Cloud Of Islam".
"What Kind of God can this be anyway?
That you've got to stop and pray to him five times a day..."


I'm surprised it was never a hit. LOL
Sean

That's actually a song about how religion in general can cloud the mind. It was also before it became fashionable to bash Islam-it was written in response to the fatwah against Salman Rushdie.

I dunno, I pray at least 5 times a day........

 

[Empty Hands]

I dunno, I pray at least 5 times a day........

I pray like Conan:
"Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you will remember if we were good men or bad, why we fought, or why we died. No, all that matters is that two stood against many, that's what's important. Valor pleases you, Crom, so grant me one request, grant me REVENGE! And if you do not listen, then the hell with you!"

 

[Touch Of Death]

That's actually a song about how religion in general can cloud the mind. It was also before it became fashionable to bash Islam-it was written in response to the fatwah against Salman Rushdie.

I dunno, I pray at least 5 times a day........

"... Where is the Love you're always talking of, when you can't stand man to man?"
Sean

 

[elder999]

"... Where is the Love you're always talking of, when you can't stand man to man?"
Sean

.

"A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man."
— Philip K. Dick (The Dark-Haired Girl)