Philosophy tells me which values the Philosopher tells me I should have and why. Those answers may not be mine based on my analysis. It is not that simple.

Your understanding of human biology is seriously flawed.

Self interest a choice and one most people do not follow rational self interest, especially conservatives.

Great points and great questions, Zen. Politics is a curse and politicians are sociopaths by definition. Politics and principles are like oil and water, indeed, no government arrived at by politics can stay true to a philosophy. Unfortunate and especially for a philosophy based upon Objectivist reason. Great observation. Equally unfortunate is that this includes politics and the rule of law.

I am approaching a watershed moment in my life that will put these questions in the spotlight. Just last week, I sat through a day and half of hearings in the US District Court in Reno, Nevada on the motion for temporary injunctive relief of the sage grouse land management plans recently issued by the Department of the Interior. Now the high bar required to issue injunctive relief is proof of imminent harm without the stay on the new land management plans. Half way through the first day, the judge admonished the testimony given from Nevada Counties of the economic train wreck these regulations will cause to the rural communities. She was citing no imminent harm has been shown. Well, that afternoon the judge got her wish. Two private mineral exploration companies (including mine) got up and testified that the new management plans have put these companies out of business. Investment capital has completely dried up and the proposed mineral withdrawals will make it permanent. It's over for us.

She granted plaintiffs request for an expedited decision. The following week she announced that she "needs more information" and a ruling for relief will not be made until after Christmas. That is usually not a good sign. If she rules to not grant relief, this will fly in the face of incontrovertible evidence of imminent harm. And it will be shown that politics (she is an Obama/Reid appointee) has gutted any semblance of rational rule of law. If she grants relief and acknowledges factual reality, her career will be ruined with her progenitors as the decision will be appealed to the 9th Circuit, and overturned. From there, the Supreme Court will probably refuse to hear the case. And politics will have prevailed. For me the watershed is just that realization, but also 40 years of career experience applied to this remarkable mineral opportunity will have been for naught in the face of this government juggernaut. America gone.

Getting through the fogs of belief is a really good question. I may be concluding that the only way will be a barrel of a gun and an empty stomach.

Look at Ayn Rand.
Philosophy is not an individual preference game, that is one's values. Philosophy tells you which values you ought to have and why. That is not something to which there can be 7 billion answers.

This is a false argument. Rights apply to all people, not just the anointed and they are not given to you by your government. Stopping people who have not been proven to be criminals from traveling is the essence of tyranny.

This is argument from pragmatism and fails on a practical level also if you goal is freedom.
Let me be clear ISIS is evil and should be wiped from the Earth, but it is not any more evil than the EPA which is complicit in the deaths of over 100 million people, but I don’t hear anyone wanting to declare war on the EPA or put everyone who has worked for the EPA in jail.
The Environmental movement wants to kill off 95% of the worlds’ population, but I –don’t hear anyone wanting to create a test for whether someone is an environmentalist or deport them.
The IRS has the ability to steal you money at any time without a warrant. They have the ability to dig into the most personal details of your life without charging you with a crime. The income tax shredded the constitution long before ISIS or radical islam. But I don’t hear any calls for a war on the IRS or its employees or supporters of the income tax.
Under Obamacare the government has the ability to without treatment to anyone for any reason, giving them to right to kill American citizens. In addition, they have the right to monitor every detail of your health and then demand that you follow their prescribed actions. Obamacare and its supporters have shredded the US constitution. Almost all of them are people born in the US. But I don’t hear any calls for a war on Obamacare or its supporters.
In the US 32,000 plus people are killed per year in automobile accidents, About 3,500 people are die from drowning, about 16,000 people are murdered each year in the US . Radical Islam in their best year killed fewer people than the number of people who drown each year.
The NSA illegally steals every US citizens information every day. They have shredded the US constitution. I don’t hear any calls for war against the NSA.
All the alphabet agencies are unconstitutional. They were created by people born in the US including FDR, Wilson, Bush, Obama etc. Don’t tell me that immigrants are going to shred our constitution.

If you are for freedom and want to promote freedom ISIS and Immigration are not even in the top ten issues you should be working on. When we let every crisis divert our attention we play into the hands of those people (Conservatives and Liberals) who want to steal our freedom. Here is a list, not necessarily in order of what pro-freedom people should be working on.

1) Eliminate the NSA, TSA, Border control (all part of the police state and all shredding the Constitution)
2) Eliminate the IRS
3) Eliminate welfare, both corporate and individual.
4) Eliminate the EPA.
5) Require that government officials are held legally responsible for their actions – no more Louis Lerners, no more Eric Holder (Fast and Furious among others), no more the EPA fining private companies but ignoring that they causes one of the biggest environmental spills in history.
6) Eliminate civil asset forfeiture. Police steal more that criminal in the US http://thefreethoughtproject.com/amer.... Talk about a serious threat to both your life and liberty.
7) Eliminate Medicare, Medicaid and social security all of which are really welfare.
8) Eliminate the FCC (who wants to regulate the internet, shredding the constitution), SEC, FBI, ATF, etc.
9) Require that congressmen cannot exempt themselves from laws (Talking about threatening our life and liberty)
10. Eliminate sovereign immunity for police. Police get away with murdering people every day in this country, not to mention they get away with theft, and perjury every day. Talk about shredding the constitution.

If you solved these problems then ISIS and immigration would either not be a problem or would be easy to solve.

Reason is volitional, you are free to not reason. However, the differentiating feature and our most important survival feature is our ability to reason.

I have been described as confused on occasion. :-) I understand all of the yes-no decisions and 0 and 1s of the boolean equations. It is a truth and can be proven with it own outcome. I cannot grasp how something can be "clearly correct" and yet could have been proven false.

As for Plato's supposed meeting with one of the Gods or the bees or whatever it was and the metaphysical, if I were a teacher I would state how one arrived at that "truth" and they must show their work.

Philosophy is simply "love of wisdom" and I do like to learn.

Ayn Rand was strongly pro-immigration but not pro-invasion by terrorists, and she understood the importance of ideas in maintaining a free society and why primitive religion is the opposite. Conservatives -- from Mark Levin to Donald Trump -- often confuse this by opposing immigration in principle and denounce it for the wrong reasons, package-dealing it with the Islamic fascist threat to the country.

The basic nature of man is that he is rational,not that he is competitive. The key insight between evolution/genetics and economic is that invention is an alternative process to evolutionary change. The key insight between evolution and ethics, is that people have to think for themselves and therefore they have to be free to exercise their reason independently.

Hear hear

In summation:
"I demand that you become free -- or else!"
There can be no rational Utopia unless the human race becomes rational, and that is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. It might happen in hundreds or thousands of years -- or never. Rand has started a pattern, which if followed, will allow persons to take steps toward that ideal, but a society of Objectivists of any great significance is not in the offing. At best it could be a semi-isolated community, but, without the motor and the weapons to go with it, I'm afraid its existence is questionable. I am not advocating giving up, however. We must be like water, the universal solvent in which everything eventually gets dissolved.

Please explain how the immigration debate and the conservative reaction to it has degraded the quality of the discussions. How could the importation of millions of people who are not grounded in the Enlightenment, capitalism, the belief in the individuality of people be a subject of any controversy with those of us who believe in such things?

I am a scientist (astronomical physics) and politically I am somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun. That's probably because of the years I spent as an engineer before being dragged into graduate school. I know a number of "scientists" that fall into the category you describe, I consider them pseudo-scientific whores. I worked in aerospace (emphasis on space) for 50 years where if you were wrong people died. No room for idealism there "Pragmatism uber alles".

Then I am confused why you would say Philosophy = a fool's errand.

Great discussion. What I see missing is the exploration of human nature. Man is a competitive animal. If not, why does everything end up as "national finals"? Man is a pack animal. It is in our DNA. We are now probably the only species that appoints those to be "leaders of our pack." No two humans are the same (unless identical twins and even they have some variation). Intellect and physical skills are mostly genetic and influenced some by environment. Smart people tend to beget smart kids, Huge people tend to beget huge kids..and so on. All of these variables play into the discussion because self reliance is dictated by both physical and mental capacity. Relying on ones self is something I view as an Ayn Rand principle . Some people are more competitive than others and tend to evolve into leaders. It seems to me that the followers tend to prefer liberal philosophy (rely on the government for security) and the doers tend to be conservatives (I will take care of myself). As for charity, Ayn Rand said it best: "Give to a person's strength, not weakness."

I agree with Hume about the is-ought problem -- which is not a denial of reason, but merely an acknowledgement that its scope does not extend to matters of taste.

But I haven't found a denial of causality in his writings. If you can cite it, I'll go back and check it out.

Interesting conversation and my love and respect of Ayn Rand. Same as you no doubt!

Political movements are defined by their underlying philosophy. In politics conservatives, like socialists, will use whatever rhetorical tool that helps them. As a result, they will pretend to be interested in reason if that helps them win their argument. Of course some people who call themselves conservatives, do not intend to truly follow these policies.

I strongly disagree. The reason many scientists are socialist is they are paid by the government and they want to serve their masters.

This is exactly what Rand said would happen in AS. This was one of the hardest things for me to accept when I read AS, however a few short years later when I was in grad school in physics I saw she was right.

Why are you here?

Those willing to sacrifice some freedom for security will get neither and deserve neither. Paraphrasing Ben Franklin.

Yes, the gulch was a place to honestly discuss the ideas of Rand and Objectivism. This did not mean you had to agree with them, I have some minor disagreements, however as long as you were honestly exploring the ideas that was allowable.

There have been several cases where socialists or religionists have attempted to monopolize the gulch, but most of those people were eased out of the gulch. However, the immigration debate has brought out a full scale conservative attack on Rand, Objectivism, and reason and degraded the quality of the discussions.