Fascinating, isn't it? They were all human, good horse traders, and canny farmers, even those with degrees.

Re: "It is even more difficult and perhaps unfair to judge people of a different time with our present day mores." I have no problem judging Hitler, Stalin, the leaders of the Spanish Inquisition and many other historical figures with our present day mores. Deliberate evil has been around for millennia, as have people who recognized and opposed it on the basis of moral standards that we would recognize and agree with today.

He also did not hold slaves for economic reasons. In the 1860s he tried to get the VA legislature to allow private citizens to emancipate their own slaves from the slavery system. Jefferson opposed slavery both morally and as economically ineffective.

In the Declaration of Independence he not only stated the general principles of unalienable rights, in the list of grievances he specifically denounced Britain for introducing the slave trade to America. Others removed it to appease the southern states in a time of war.

I agree he was against slavery. BUT, he put his own self interest ahead of the moral principles he espoused. A lot of people are intellectually conflicted I suppose, even then.

I stand corrected. Slavery is indeed alive and well right here in the USA, not to mention in most other places. How about enforced taxation, where we are forced to work for several months of the year for the government and its wealth transfer programs. Its gone, at least temporarily, but the draft was slavery in its worst form- where you are forced to sacrifice your life for some politician's whims.

I visited Monticello and it really brings out another side of Jefferson. I think he got political blowback from his opposition to slavery. He sure enjoyed the financial benefits of it though, while other Virginia plantations were freeing their slaves. I am saying he was saying one thing but doing another and most probably because his plantation and home required the cheap labor and he didn't want to give that up

Jefferson did not create slavery, but he participated in it and benefited from it. His deeds failed to match his words, and gave moral cover to several succeeding generations of slaveholders.

Slavery was never the "base of all civilization" and was never "necessary". It is the opposite of civilization and everything necessary for a creative, productive economy.

The government has made private slavery illegal, only to be replaced by government enforced slavery in terms of taxation. Although it IS voluntary, credit is a form of slavery too.

Greetings EdGoldstein,
I concur. A cold reality.
We are fortunate to live in times where it has for the most part been left in the past.
Respectfully,
O.A.

Most technology replacing slavery today is based on hydrocarbon energy. Invent an excuse to force society to stop using hydrocarbons, and what will be the result? Yes, slavery, camouflaged as socialism "for the greater good.".

We will never really know. But after a trip to Monticello it was pretty evident 1) he had hundreds of slaves freed only upon his death 2) other plantation owners were known to voluntarily free their slaves but Jefferson didn't 3) Jefferson was land rich but otherwise relatively poor 4) his whole plantation life was heavily dependent on manual labor to raise the food and run the plantation. Those factors lead me to the conclusion that he needed and therefore took advantage of slavery

Yes, I agree. There are many who prey on others who purport to be friends but are not. The person I referenced was never a friend. And, I have moved on, although it does rankle a bit that I was taken in; but not for long.

There are friends and there are acquaintances. True friends are few, acquaintances many.

In the case of Hillary, You can lead a skunk to water, but you can't stop its stink.

The are well set out in Branden's article on this subject, as well as by Michael Shermer. If you don't have copies, let me know and I can send them to you.

If one exposes there is arsenic in Kool Aid, it does not mean the person is against Kool Aid. The same is true with regard to any other subject, including Rand and Objectivism.

To attack me and Shermer as you do here, is to commit most of the fallacies David Kelley lists in his book “Art of Reasoning.” As Kelley explains: “An ad hominem argument rejects or dismisses another person’s statement by attacking the person rather than the statement itself. As we will see, there are many different forms of this fallacy, but all of them involve some attempt to avoid dealing with a statement logically, and in each case the method is to attempt to discredit the speaker by citing some negative trait. An ad hominem argument has the form:

(X says p) + (X has some negative trait)
Therefore
p is false

“This is a fallacy because the truth or falsity of the statement itself, or the strength of an argument for it, has nothing to do with the character, motives, or any other trait of the person who makes the statement or argument.
This principle is true even when we are concerned with testimonial evidence, but we have to keep a certain distinction in mind. If someone defends a position by citing an authority, as we have seen, then it is legitimate to consider evidence regarding the authority's competence and objectivity. In a trial where the jury is asked to accept the testimony of a witness, it is certainly legitimate for the opposing side to introduce evidence that the witness is dishonest or biased. But discrediting witnesses or authorities does not provide evidence that what they say is actually false; it merely eliminates any reason for thinking that, what they say is true. So we go back to square one: we are left with no evidence one way or the other. In other contexts, where there is no issue of relying on authorities, the use of discrediting evidence about the person is always fallacious. If someone offers an argument for his position, then it doesn't matter how rotten or stupid lie is. We have to evaluate the argument on its merits.

“In its crudest form, the ad hominem fallacy involves nothing more than insults calling one's opponent an idiot, slob, lowlife, airhead, fascist, pinko, nerd, fairy, bleeding heart, wimp, Neanderthal, and so on through the rich vocabulary of abuse our language offers. Unlike the other fallacies, moreover, this one is committed fairly often in its crude form. In personal disputes, disagreement often breeds anger, and angry people hit below the belt. In politics, ad hominem arguments are a common technique of propaganda and a common device of politicians who try to enlist support by attacking their enemies. But the fallacy can also take more sophisticated forms. Let's look at a few.”

I categorize your words in the “crudest form” designation.

A heuristic program is a deterministic program in which criteria uncertain with respect to the application are employed for the deterministic program decisions. It does not change the nature of the program itself to be something other than deterministic.

AI does not depend on "how you view man's reason". Man's reason is what it is and so is the nature of programming. Neither changes in accordance with a "view". That the nervous system is part of how the brain works is well known. No one has explained how it results in and works in conjunction with what we know as the axiomatic fact of consciousness. That has nothing to do with mysticism and alleged souls. Mechanistic versus mystic is a false alternative.

The philosophical materialist claim that all phenomena of life, including consciousness, can be accounted for by reductionism from the physics of the inanimate, let alone the mechanistic, is a fallacy with no grounding in science or logic. A science, including biology, is determined by the nature of its subject matter, not what anyone decides to believe what mechanistic physics must be able to do, without regard for the nature and role of consciousness, which physics does not study or explain.

For a full discussion of the fallacy of reductionism in biology see Robert Efron's "Biology without Consciousness" in The Objectivist Vol 7, nos 2-4, Feb-May, 1968, reprinted from Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Vol II, No. 1, Autumn 1967, pp 9-36.

The Turing test is a fallacy based in Logical Positivism. That someone can or cannot distinguish effects of a human versus a machine says nothing about the nature of either or what else it can or will do, and explains nothing.

If you're asking if an artificial human can ever be created, no one knows. There is too much still unknown about how we work. We do know that today's programmed machines and "artificial intelligence" are nothing like man the rational animal, and that there is no evidence that it is anything but far off. There are still more than enough problems getting AI to do what it is being sold as even in limited functions.

I absolutely agree that GW Bush's statement along that line was a fallacy. But the real damage of 911 was self inflicted and the external parts were a side show.