Starbuckle

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  1. Ayn Rand (I think) once recommended a show or movie about a boy who finds himself alone in a small plane (presumably because a heart attack or some other affliction had killed the pilot). The boy is scared stiff, but a pilot on the ground helps him to land the plane. The story is about the relationship between the pilot and the boy, and how the boy manages to function despite his fear. This is something I have tried to find on and off for years. A title and perhaps info on where and when Rand's notice appeared would be great if anybody has the info. Thanks.
  2. Um: "NEW expurgated edition, mildly entertaining character sketch of an elderly retired author and the middle aged vixen who steals his heart. No third act. They both live forever, and it doesn't matter what really happened, because it offended and disgusted my pal Tom. Priced 20 cents above production cost because the guts and heat were ripped up and thrown away. Swell way to end a career, mutilated. As far as I'm concerned, Cocktail no longer exists." Sounds like the purpose of the ad copy is to prevent sales.
  3. Why are you calling Robert Bidinotto "Biddibob"? What is the purpose of this gratuitous snideness?
  4. "If all 'Christian Objectivists' mean is that they are people who loosely follow the Bible and loosely follow Objectivism, I say go for it. They don't do me any harm and they are certainly no threat to me. May they go in peace. I won't be joining them, but I won't be throwing stones at them, either." The question wasn't about whether to harangue "Christian Objectivists" but about the meaning of words. Objectivism is a primacy-of-existence philosophy. Any form of meaningful religious belief assumes the primacy of consciousness. Confusions about the proper metaphysics may be manifested in a zillion ways, but you can't hold as a primary both that existence comes first and is independent of consciousness and that you start with a consciousness or consciousnesses that somehow created and sustain existence. An awful lot of people who may be very nice and responsible are wrong about various fundamental things. Should we beat them up for being wrong? No. Are they wrong about the things that they are wrong about? Yes. Is "Christian Objectivism" a contradiction in terms? Yes.
  5. In what Harden quoted, Kelley does not distinguish clearly between the form of perception and the thing being perceived. Color as a form of perception requires the operation of sensory organs. But insofar as the color conveys information about external objects being perceived, what makes color is an object that exists independently of any perception. Sensory forms are products of an interaction. Kelley does clearly distinguish between form and object in his book. In any case, the so-called Copenhagen interpretation is indeed nonsense. Electrons exist independently or not, and there is no way except "independently" that things in the world of whatever kind can exist, whether or not we are justified in calling them "entities" in a primary sense. The fact that we have means of observing electrons or inferring their existence provides evidence that they do exist, not that they can't exist unless we observe them. What can't exist without observations are observations. If Kelley really said in private correspondence or anywhere that "Even if entities do exist only in relation to our means of perception..." then this is no problem, his wording implies a grotesque muddle. What can exist only in relation to a means of perception is the form in which we perceive the entities. Entities exist regardless of the form in which they are perceived. Radically different forms give us the same, overlapping or complementary information about the same thing. Bake an apple pie, and then see whether radically different forms of perception--smell, sight, taste--enable you to know that the pie is ready to eat. Given the clarity and precision of his book The Evidence of the Senses, I suspect either that Kelley is being misquoted or that he did not intend to say what he seems to be saying.
  6. Perhaps I haven't read enough of the thread, but I don't have a clear idea of the problem. "How can life be worth living?" cannot even begin to be answered with respect to a given person's life without an idea of what it is which is making someone feel that life is not worth living. Lives have details. If a person were to tell me, "No no, I have all the regular components that fulfill other people, loving spouse or boy/girlfriend, productive and challenging job that exercises my interests and faculties, living in a good neighborhood, I enjoy food and movies and music, no mental or physical affliction, the cat is well-behaved and the toilet is not overflowing, etc.; but I just have this feeling that life cannot be worth living, and I don't even see how there can even be any possibility of its ever being worth the effort involved"--I'd feel either that some crucial information were being omitted or that I were being sold a bill of goods. This, for example, seems suspect to me: "I can't think of any future state I want to achieve. It's all so empty. Why choose to live? I'm over it." What if one attained a state of not feeling empty? Would that also be "so empty"? What if one had a glimpse that a better feeling about life is possible? Why is life too painful, or nothing _but_ pain? What are we talking about? A dead end job that makes one feel trapped? Inability to get a date or companionship? Having lost a loved one in a tragic accident? Chronic illness? Disfigurement? Paraplegia? Addiction? Abuse? Being 72 years old and stuck in prison for the next 20 years? Being stuck in Canada? What? Many other relevant questions would arise as the story begins to be told. But even if we knew something of the background, the best that persons of good will could do in a thread like this is suggest a few possibilities for pursuing a remedy. I agree with the commenter who said that a person suffering such a persistent feeling of hopelessness should seek professional help. Or, if professional help is not feasible for whatever reason, should at least talk in person to someone sensible in a candid way about the problems.
  7. See Wendy McElroy's responses to many of the issues raised in this thread, including the sexual content, at her web site. The posts are listed on this page: http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?cat.21
  8. "Anyone who knows anything about fasting knows that during a fast, hunger (or what is called hunger) goes away." BaalChatzaf is a chronic troll.
  9. The voice of this essay and of other essays by you that I have read is more vivid and engaging than at least the early pages of the DeVoon novel I checked out at Amazon. Since I have sampled only one novel, take this with a grain of salt. But perhaps one possibility is to pursue a basically different approach to fiction. I mean fewer standard structural elements, transitions, dialogue, attributions, physical details; more essay-voice commenting on the events transpiring; more witty, slashing, digressive meditation. Let the narrator be a non-participant.
  10. "I couldn't detect in what little I heard if he even understands the difference between learning something conceptually and acquiring a skill..." You apparently didn't listen to what little you heard. Binswanger did not claim that one must be able to conceptualize what's involved in the skill of bicycle-riding in order to learn how to ride a bike. He said that we know have (mentally) information about how to do it that would be difficult to conceptualize, or at least that it is _not_ the same task. You add that repetition is involved in learning a skill and that neural patterns are formed. Did Binswanger dispute that repetition is involved in learning a skill? Another commenter objects to BInswanger's mentioning the book he's been working on for many years on the subject of How We Know in response to a question about how we know.... Is citing your own published further explanation of a question being directly asked really objectionable in some way?
  11. It would make for a good episode of "To Tell the Truth." "I am Ayn Rand's intellectual heir." "No, I am Ayn Rand's intellectual heir." "Actually, I am Ayn Rand's intellectual heir." "Intellectual heir number two, how come you pronounced 'Ayn' as if it rhymes with 'pane,' while the other two claimants pronounce her first name as if it rhymes with 'pine'?" "Intellectual heir number three, was the ceremony of your being anointed _the_ intellectual heir videotaped; and if so, where is the video now?" "Intellectual heir number one, how frequently must you as i.h. expel persons from Official Objectivism as a means of countering reasonable criticism in order to maintain your credentials as Rand's intellectual heir? And is 'intellectual' the right word for that procedure? Also, why are other advocates of 'reason as the only absolute' willing to play along with this?" "Intellectual heir number three, what is the definition of 'table'...."
  12. "There's nothing wrong with the textbooks, Phil. The problem is your short attention span and resistance to work -- your wish for everything to be made easy for you by others, and to then move on to a shallow understanding of the next subject that momentarily interests you....lazy dabblers like you." Wow. So I guess we shouldn't proceed from Economics in One Lesson to Man, Economy and State to Human Action, just dig right in with the hard-to-understand stuff. What an asshole.
  13. Yes, it depends on the details. But it's often not important to distinguish explicitly between whether a kind of action is moral or immoral per se and whether it's both moral and prudent to act in a specific context. The relevance of specifying and applying is taken for granted. (Whether an action is moral per se can't be the only desideratum, since there is usually a range of moral alternatives in pursuing a goal. Morality only gives boundaries.) If we say "it's moral to eat," we don't thereby imply that it's moral to eat anything, under any circumstance, by any means whatever. Nobody has to explain, "Well, an Objectivist will tell you that whether you have a right to eat is not the only consideration here in determining the morality of a specific act of consumption, whereas the libertarian doesn't care whether he's eating vegetables or drinking cyanide, he's going to assert his right to consume." Of course people can make bad choices while acting morally. The willfully bad choices may be immoral, depending on the motive and the consequences. They may not be. If you decide to act against the thug despite a large personal cost, it's moral per se to do so, if it is just to do so (which depends on both what the thug is doing and how you propose to respond); even if some of your decisions about when and how to go about it are blunders.
  14. Of course if one "sets aside" all the actual work that people do should that work be deemed inadequately emblematic of Productivity, then productive people will seem less productive than they are. We're "setting aside" lectures and essays because they haven't yet been collected into books? Really? We also seem to even be "setting aside" Kelley's fully Productivity-emblemizing published books. A Life of One's Own doesn't make the cut?