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Reactions from the public! Sic' em, Rorie!

Doesn't look you got it correctly, no. No. You ought to read the article in its entirety. Objectivism is subjective because the basic tenet of the ethic, if taken as a Categorical Imperative (that is, an objective moral imperative to be followed in all cases due to its perfect reason, regardless of a person's will) has to include a premise that invalidates the statement through an infinite regress (meaning that it doesn't really make sense). The tenet works as a hypothetical imperative (that is, a subjective imperative to be followed given that certain conditional requirements are met, possibly subject to will) but they don't call it Subjectivism, they call it Objectivism, because it's not supposed to be subjective, dig? In a nutshell, Objectivism, it being rationalist to a ridiculous degree, tends to treat everything from economics to politics as being subject to deductive reasoning (in other words, all things can be understood in the same way mathematics can) thus when an Objectivist comes to a conclusion, there's no way that conclusion can't be an irreducible reality. Not coincidentally Objectivists tend to express a fervor that is the envy of dogmatics the world over, making them insufferable douchebags of the first order. That's not a review of Atlas Shrugged, that's just someone's take on Objectivism in general and its tendency towards idolatry of a Superman ideal that doesn't really exist. I fixed the summation for you. Objectivism is supreme egoism - It is considered improper and immoral to consider "others" in your choices. The self is of paramount importance and there aren't even the concessions to personal preference that you'd see in subjective egoist ethics. That is, while Hobbes would say that giving to charity is all fine and good if you get something out of it, Rand would say you're giving of your precious self and thus committing an immoral act. Hobbes would say conceding to others can be the right thing to do if it benefits you in the end, or avoids harm on your part, Rand is generally not a fan of submission. Can you see now why Chris Avellone effectively made KOTOR2's villain a Rand surrogate? It's because Objectivism is a big 'ol bouquet of ****.

Oh and a friend of mine leveled this analysis to The Fountainhead and Rand's general oeuvre - Obviously quite a seductive ethic for people who really, really love themselves. Switch some words and you've got a fairly succinct version of a racist / sexist / fascist worldview.

Objectivist epistemology is not really of interest to me and thus I never read up on it. She might well be solid in her epistemology, but looking at her ethics it seems unlikely to me. What I am interested in is Objectivist ethics which, more than most other ethical systems, has some glaring flaws, particularly when it comes to self-contradiction, which is probably the most embarrassing flaw to exhibit if you're an ethicist. I've already mentioned the is / ought problem, which as ethics goes is really common, but it provides special problems for Rand, such that she tried (and failed) to overcome it herself. I'll snag some quotes from page 7-10 of the link to illustrate what I mean. BLOCK OF TEXT INBOUND. The typos are a result of Adobe Reader messing up copying from a scan - The whole thing is quite fascinating. Back to the glibness! Ayn Rand is the Ed Wood of philosophy! Yackety Schmackety Dooo! This lady read Atlas Shrugged, and he made a Cliff's Notes version so you wouldn't have to do the same! However I'm sure she'll appreciate the novel once a masculine man has violent sex with her in a way she secretly wants but never expresses a preference for, thus being subject to the greatest majesty of the power that the righteous hold. Go Objectivism!

You're mistaking "lazy" for "glib". It's been a long time since I've read Atlas Shrugged and I've purged the vast majority of it from my memory and he's right, really, because what happens in the novel is entirely incidental to its purpose. Are we to glean from your scoffing that there is really something in the back half of Atlas Shrugged that changes the game and brings the novel and its ideas into sharp focus? Because there isn't. The embarrassing truth about the review is that you really don't have to finish Atlas Shrugged, or get even halfway through it, to absorb it in its entirety. Admittedly, Pickrel rolled the dice on the book and bet that there wasn't anything beyond what he surmised from the first few hundred pages of the book. Pretty smart gamble! Ayn Rand novels and subtlety exist in polar opposition to one another, and no amount of strain can get the two to touch. There isn't a suggestion of theme that's developed from the first page to the climax. The theme is there, developed in the first pages, it's one note on the scale pounded over and over and over and over and over and over. It's a Michael Bay novel - An explosion in the first frame and explosions and explosions and more explosions nonstop until the credits. There is no character development as there are no characters. There are only mouthpieces, bags of words just waiting to be squeezed so that their endless monologues (none of which serve to separate character personalities from one another, not unlike a Kevin Smith film) can come farting out, their natures telegraphed by their lazily-sketched descriptions. There is no important plot. The focus is the rhetoric, and it doesn't take a lot to really get what Rand is getting at. If it takes you more than the first few hundred pages then you're exceedingly thick (and thus actually a pretty good candidate for Randian Objectivism and/or Ron Paul fandom) There are no diamonds deep in the bottom of this septic tank, it's just the same old **** from bottom to top and when you've smelled a cup of it you've smelled the whole vat. It's rancid writing, lazy, inelegant, crude, labored and yet simple, an essay stretched to a bloated, distended epic. It cheapens the written word. Unsurprisingly it's well-loved by high schoolers. (I don't know if you've notice but I'm giving big ups to Mama Rand by using as many words as possible to convey simple concepts! It's a real delight.)

I ran across a pretty good review of a little under a quarter of Atlas Shrugged, published by Harper's back when the novel was first published. Back in 1991 the Book of the Month Club and the Library of Congress conducted a survey to determine what books most influenced Americans' lives. The top 2 books were The Bible and Atlas Shrugged. That pretty much sums up the United States, I think.

The idea of tariffs are a serious no-no for Objectivists, they see it at collectivist ideas and inherently evil. Randians do not like the US being a superpower based on the current stream of events (the aftermath of the cold war). About the third/post-colonial world, it has to do with their natural resources, high corruption and tribal mentality. Take a look at Botswana for example. With no natural resources of their own, they had to develop their own country by themselves, with their own means and traditions and look at them succeeding. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion they have no resources of their own. The largest industries in Botswana are resource cultivation industries - primarily mining for export, a sector that (surprise!) has seen direct encouragement from the gov't. And while the country is anomalously stable for an African nation, its unemployment hovers somewhere around 25-40%, and GDP growth by percentage is exaggerated - The US grows by 2% and outpaces the growth of every developing nation put together dozens of times over, even when those nations have very high rates of growth. There's no equalization happening. Which is the way it works.

I don't know if I'd call Ayn Rand a "moron", per se. I think a good distillation of her as a historical figure would be "a pretty amazing grudge bearer". Her entire life's work is basically sour grapes complaints about the USSR (which was fairly terrible to be honest) taken to ridiculous extremes. Another pretty solid defining label for Rand is "awful writer". I don't think there's any better evidence of her lack of writing prowess than her novels being taken as straight philosophical texts. They're pretty dire reads, containing monologues that run for dozens upon dozens of pages. But she's fairly popular, primarily because she provides a safe place for all those bitter white men who feel their privilege threatened and belittled by the ethnics and the women and the cripples. Objectivism and libertarianism in general provide a space where people of great privilege can feel as though they deserve what they have regardless of how they got it, a space free of responsibility and worry and disempowering "context", a place of self-love and confidence. Deep at the heart of conservatism is the is / ought worldview, that is, a belief that what is, is the way that it ought to be. I have money and power and thus I am a "haver", an honest man entitled to what's mine, and those below me are "wanters" who are barely more than animals. That I inherited my money, my education, my social network, and all of my opportunities from other people is immaterial. What matters is that I was the one taking advantage of those opportunities, not some sap who didn't have the good sense to bring his or herself into my circumstances through considerably more struggle than I will ever exert. My status is its own justification. A remarkable capacity for the delusion that white men of power are an oppressed minority is commonly demonstrated by objectivists (pretty sure Taks expressed that sentiment around here sometime last year) as well as conservatives in general (Rush Limbaugh, among others) Libertarians tend to speak of free markets in utopian tones, talking about true merit being rewarded in ways that aren't seen now because of gov't interference, but it seems fairly obvious to me that the "radical change" that they espouse is really just a change of degrees. Economics and social dynamics are connected in ways that go unacknowledged by free-marketeers, more because the relationship is dismissed as unimportant than because of ignorance. An objectivist either finds himself making a whole lot of excuses fairly quickly when he accepts as a given the idea that a person is not solely responsible for his circumstances or he turns the rhetoric up to 11. I look at the unstoppable advance of neoliberalism and the World Trade Organization, which is a free-market organ that actually has the kind of power to promote liberal trade policy over states that makes libertarians' innards tingle with excitement. Various actions that a government can take - protectionist efforts to shore up industry in a developing country, do-gooder embargoes on goods openly produced through the violation of human rights or environmental degradation - are sharply and swiftly dealt with by the international economic community. The international free market has a tool that it can wield over law established by states in this way. Most would say that this violates basic democratic principles, but if you're of the mind that the only freedom that matters is the freedom of goods to be traded across borders, if that doesn't get your objectivist **** hard I'm not sure what will. One of the results of this is that the average wage of people living in developing countries has gone up from completely dismal to slightly less completely dismal. Another result is the exacerbation and cementing of the colonization-era global dynamic between powerful consumer/producer states in the northern hemisphere and vassal producer/resource provider states in the southern hemisphere. Left to sink or swim there's no reason to believe that relative situations of your average person in the US and your average Laotian would change all that much in a fully free world market. The benefits of colonialism have been reaped, the colonial powers are fat and strong and powerful, and unless you're talking about the span of hundreds of years it seems unlikely that lots would be changed all that much. It seems clear that the horrors of the colonial era that still reverberate today are in fact a consequence of pure market forces at work in those times. At this point I'll actually quote the Pope - There is no reason to suspect that this dynamic would change were governments to suddenly atrophy. Laotians would still be starving and Americans would still be itching for things to buy, and the same deals would be struck - Laos denigrates itself for the US' table scraps. Having come from a free market, the conditions that the feeble third world and the lumbering first world would be in would in fact be natural, harmonious states. Such a notion that poverty (rare among white men comparitive to other groups, oddly enough) is a natural and desirable thing and that every man is out for himself can be generously described as social darwinism, another rather common conservative idea. Anyway, back to Ayn Rand. She's been a disaster for pop culture, I'll say that much. Not only has she led directly to the sad and rapid decline of comics whiz Steve Ditko (now best known as the inspiration for Watchmen's Rorschach) but she inspired the music of Rush. Also her followers tend to write some hilarious dear John letters. Witness! Pro-tip, my people - it is better for you, and better for America, if you refrain from mixing your genetic material or otherwise fraternizing with people who own leatherbound copies of all Rand works. If you see these items in the vicinity of a love interest's workplace or place of residence, plan an exit and execute it as quickly as possible.

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moar If somebody has a .gif creator that can cycle through them every second or so, that would be ideal.

Hmm, the print of his shirt sort of blends with the logo but I'll roll with it.

Make it happen.

RE4's PC port was hilarious (they kept the gamecube controller prompts) so excuse me if I don't have high hopes.

I could never bard it in BG2, probably because I never got used to micromanaging everything in my party (except for the spellcasters) the Blade, however, can become a pretty formidable fighter. I'm not sure why they even made that class a bard class considering how his combat abilities come at the expense of bard abilities. It's basically a fighter/mage with a spell ceiling at 6th level and a bunch of nifty tricks up his sleeve.

Do us a favor and slap this guy upside the head next time you see him, Obsidz people.

It also seems realistic that he can just use one SMG at a time!

As far as content fitting or not fitting the Fallout setting, I'm of the mind that all that's really needed for something to be acceptable in a Fallout game is to look a the established vision that was created, as a gestalt conception, and consider if it's possible that the content being added could exist in the same gameworld. As far as Mothership Zeta goes, there were aliens in the first two games, both as encounters in F2 and an "easter egg" of a sort in F1, although since you could take the blaster out of that easter egg encounter and use it throughout the gameworld, I'm inclined to call it "hidden content" rather than an "easter egg", unless we're willing to argue that acquiring the alien blaster turns all game content after that into an extended joke, and that sort of leap seems pointless to me. Aliens could certainly exist in Fallout I think. The criticism that their plan in MZ doesn't make sense is a valid one, however. I think that's one thing you can definitely discredit Bethsoft for in Fallout 3 and elsewhere - you meet Mr. Burke in Megaton and he doesn't really have any reason at all to destroy Megaton aside from the fact that he hates it, and he's evil, and the sequence of blowing it up would look cool. If they were going to include an alien plot that made sense internally, they'd be, I don't know, beings who can survive in polluted and irradiated areas, and so they invade rather than destroy. But given the criteria I outlined (again, possibility of existence) the DLC thus far doesn't really break the Fallout setting. Weird mutations are par for the Fallout course - the original game was going to have talking, mutated raccoons. Some of the stuff in the OC does, however, like the android. Robotics in Fallout have been of the huge and metallic type, towards the prehistoric end of the spectrum (even with the use of live brains as hard drives / processors), so it doesn't make much sense that Canterbury Commons would suddenly be able to advance all the way to synthetic flesh, which is far-future tech. I think we can reasonably assume that Obsidz will not make the same mistakes. Bethsoft failed in other respects, such as making super mutants simple and uninteresting, but few of the things they've done can be said to have actually broken the setting.

The original Fallouts had robots with human brains for heads. Come on guys, it's genre stuff. Like, you can't be a champion of Cronenberg films and then claim that you don't really like horror because Cronenberg is "different". Fallout is sci-fi of a sort, and it has all kinds of throwbacks to cheesy Cold War **** - Necropolis was almost straight out of I Am Legend, radiation made ordinary creatures grow huge in size, the robobrains, evil computers. I'm reading the jab that Bethsoft is placating the 10-year olds in its audience and my mind is boggled because I ****ing loved Fallout when I was 10 (got it for Christmas) because of all the gore and edginess but also because it was good sci-fi fantasy - it created a world that really captured my imagination. I find it kind of sad that people have chosen to look past that part of Fallout and instead have intellectualized it to the point where the ridiculous **** can't be a part of the game, it all has to be some grim exercise in RPG design philosophy. Fallout is great but it's not the Brothers Karamazov. It's ****ing Jaws.

Why don't you play a game that increases your awareness of the world and your place in it?

Pretty sure it was packaged in a bigger tweak mod. I want to say it was BG2 tweaks, actually. It worked for BG1 at least - changing Khalid into a fighter-mage makes him entirely more useful, since it removes the quaintness of BG's non-munchkin stats. Also I think the Quest Pack and Unfinished Bidness are incompatible with each other. Or it might have been one of the other big important mods (baldurdash?)

brrrrr

If the Steam version of F3 works with the Fallout Mod Manager then you should be able to get the DLC off of Games for Windows Live and FOMM will move it to a place where it can be compatible with the game. At least I think it will. Also it makes me sad that we'll be seeing the earth from space not from B.O.M.B II, but from an alien spaceship. I wonder if you can see the moon colony as well.

Whereabouts was the Nursery supposed to be again?