The End of OCON 2005 (For Me)

I only signed up for the first week of OCON 2005, so I left San Diego yesterday.

The whole OCON 2005 experience was great fun.  Highlights directly from the conference included the talks I praised (Brook, Biddle, Lewis), and the USS Midway event.  On top of that, I stayed up pretty late every night chatting with people on various topics.  It's nice to know that no one is going to pull out the old line "but what about the poor (or minority group x or the lousewort or this layer of pond scum or Judges 19)" when discussing ethics or politics.

Actually, now that I think about it, most people I talk to day-to-day don't even get that specific.  If I say anything radical-sounding (e.g. "abolish Social Security"), most people just assert it can't be done, as if I proposed a perpetual motion machine or time travel.  How depressing that people treat majority opinion as an unshakeable law of physics.

But I digress.  Some of the conversations I was in focused on movies, relationships, parenting, how nice San Diego was, good and bad restaurants visited, and cartoons.  I heard a lot of opinions, strongly held and defended, every time.  Objectivist conferences are not the place to go if you are looking for milquetoast.  However, if you are looking to hang out with people who live life and value it, passionately, I'd make a point to attend.