Cool Video of Barbara around the Time of Passion


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Cool Video of Barbara around the Time of Passion

 

Lookee what I just found!

 

 

Talk about the uncut version.

 

Both Barbara and R. W. Bradford stumbled a bit in their presentations. And there are annoying commercials, so there it is. I don't care, though. What a presentation!

 

Bradford introduced her--and it was great for me to finally see who this important unsung hero in our subcommunity was.

 

Enjoy.

 

Michael

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R.W. died of Kidney cancer in the late fall of 2005. He really made libertarianism click with his Liberty magazine. He subsidized it off his coin business. I think he also subsidized The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS). I think that continued for many years after his death.

--Brant

he sold me a 1.3 ounce numismatic gold coin once--I had to sell it at a loss at the gold market bottom--it was a rare Peruvian--I would have lost a lot more if I had purchased it in a higher grade he had available, but I told him I didn't want to get any farther away from the bullion price--and then he surprised me by saying he was into US currency, especially the old stuff, and I told him my old college friend Peter Huntoon, a hydrologist, was an expert who had written some reference books and R.W. knew and respected him

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Michael, delighted you found this and posted it. I almost never watch a video or audio that people put into posts. Just don’t have time, and like Brant, I can gather information from text so much faster than from people talking. I made a rare exception for this one, and glad I did. I never met Barbara Branden or heard her talk in person. I had seen one or two videos of her making remarks around 2005, which I didn’t care for because of very speculative psychology stuff about Ayn Rand, and what seemed like a slant toward the sour in her take on Rand’s relations to her readers and on Rand’s life after the Branden’s.

It was nice to hear Ms. Branden at this earlier age, apparently in 1996. Most of these remarks are about her historical research in the years of work on Passion. Fascinating. I recall Barbara Tuchman remarking how the research becomes so endlessly delicious, but eventually one has to turn to the (for her) harder task of putting pen to paper in writing the book. I can’t get to it now, but I look forward to reading Passion in the distant future, as well as reading the forthcoming biography by Dr. Milgram.

One bit of Ms. Branden’s limitations concerning sympathetic Rand readers back in the day did show up in these 1996 remarks. She mentioned that at the time of the break between Rand and the Brandens such readers and followers thought along the lines “If even the social relationships between these god-like persons AR and NB fail, then what chance do I have in social relationships? None.” This sort of projection of what we thought is, I imagine, some myopia by running in the NYC – NBI circles at that time, and by the view from these gods’ imagined heights with respect to readers and students at the time. Most such readers were not part of those circles and their reputed level of intellectual and emotional slavishness. The reaction, expressly so, in my own circle of friends at the time of the break was that we knew persons (each other) who were more rational and better Objectivists than AR and NB given their split. We suspected there was more to the story than Rand had told, and when N. Branden made some remark about Rand trying to seduce him, one in our circle (LN I think) added she had heard it was more than a try. We didn’t care what were all the particulars behind the split, we concluded the breakup of AR and NB in their joint venture of promoting Objectivism was irrational. Had we imagined so far as the long-term deception of Ayn by Nathan on personal relations, we would have been dissuaded concerning Rand's rationality in making the split. But our youthful views anyway of what is irrational were too broad and too much tethered to our own hopes for the future of the philosophy, particularly hope for it to affect the culture in a positive way, concerning which, we rated the importance of NBI too highly.

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R.W. died of Kidney cancer in the late fall of 2005. He really made libertarianism click with his Liberty magazine. He subsidized it off his coin business. I think he also subsidized The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS). I think that continued for many years after his death.

As much as I disliked Bradford for publishing cranky articles under pseudonyms just to start a food fight, the libertarian movement lost a hero when he died. The now defunct Liberty magazine brought together the greatest minds in the movement and there has been nothing since to take its place.

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is still operational. Last issue was December 2014.

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R.W. died of Kidney cancer in the late fall of 2005. He really made libertarianism click with his Liberty magazine. He subsidized it off his coin business. I think he also subsidized The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS). I think that continued for many years after his death.

As much as I disliked Bradford for publishing cranky articles under pseudonyms just to start a food fight, the libertarian movement lost a hero when he died. The now defunct Liberty magazine brought together the greatest minds in the movement and there has been nothing since to take its place.

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is still operational. Last issue was December 2014.

I was a subscriber to Liberty throughout its print run. I hardly read every article for most were not all that good, but I read almost all of Bradford's with his name attached. Once it went electronic I stopped with it altogether. I just spent five minutes trying to find it on the Internet and articles are still being published albeit not in any magazine form.

http://libertyunbound.com

--Brant

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