Selfishness contra altruism, the individual against the collective

I feel like that if the TC had his perfect world, poor people would be eating each other in the street.

1. Rationale is objective. If people successfully performing a means towards some irrational end, their behaviour is still irrational.

2. Altruism contradicts individualism, and vice versa. If you believe both can be good, then you are contradicting yourself.

3. Helping others for the sake of your own self-interest is not altruism and is not relevant to this discussion.

4. Please provide an example of a successful democratic society that is uninhibited by concepts such as constitutional rights

5. They're goals are irrational, and their means towards achieving those goals therefore have nothing to do with rational self-interest. Just looking at what ended up happening to Pol Pot and the Nazis shows that they were clearly not carrying out their self-interest. Your attempts at clever zingers at the end of each post are fatiguing.Laihendi

1. The ends can be motivated by non-rational values (ethical ends usually are), the reasoning on how to get to that end IS the instrumental rationality. You're working backward, again.
2. How would they be contradicting themselves?
3. I wasn't sure what your point was. Suppose I shouldn't care about it.
4. Did you actually just skip over my point? Liberal democracy is still a celebrated and recognized form democracy. Not everyone who advocates democracy goes with Athenian democracy or naked majoritarianism. They are forms of democracy, but they are not the set.
5. Um, the fact that they were not clairvoyant does not mean they acted irrationality on how to achieve their ends. I'm not really sure how you think murdering Jews wasn't in the self-interest of the Nazi party either: that's what they valued a lot, evidently. You must think you know the self-interest of other people better than they do (least that's what I'm getting.)

And perhaps if you don't want people to make zingers, don't start the trend, you stupid little twerp.

I'm honestly just tempted to cut this off here and will. I can tell from the discussion we're having on (4) that it's hopeless.

So for the record has anyone actually agreed with the TC? It seems like everyone agrees to some extent that he's wrong in his assumptions.Ace6301

You're really going to slander the president that's responsible for the world super-power in economic and military terms? And then proceed to call Napoleon - a genius, opposite to the imbecile that Ayn Rand is - a monster? Why? Because he toppled and fought monarchies and centuries-old noble families?

I've nothing against those who don't practice altruism, the same way I don't have anything against those who are more concerned with their own interests than with those of the collective. It is a choice. But your advocates' reasoning is weak, as is yours - Ayn Rand's horrible, bi-dimensional characters and her even worse development and exposure of her objectivism theories. Ron Paul.. honestly, :lol:.

In any case, I quote thee:

"Democracy has been a complete failure, and yet according to consensus it has been a stunning success. Well of course the consensus would say that, as if the consensus inherently has any credibility, because democracy represents the rule of consensus. Democracy has been failing for two and a half thousand years, and yet the consensus says it is good, and the masses assume the consensus is correct because they are the consensus. The Athenians lost the Peloponessian War because of the voters were all idiotically given an equal voice in the manner of how the war should be carried out, and conniving politicians turned matters of the state into a circus, and yet you'll never learn about that in the public schools because it contradicts their anti-intellectual anti-individualism agenda."

From that excerpt it's safe to assume you believe in aristocratical governments, that you are against equality and in favor of social/financial segregation. You think an intellectual minority should govern over an allegedly 'idiotic population'. We've been there, we've beaten that - some sooner than others. Your whole wall of text is a massive pile of contradictory dung - you try to play Ayn Rand and Ron Paul's side all the while criticizing democracy and siding with a system closer to a 'caste' system - something both would vehemently disagree with.