How much compassion is due someone who quite publicly hated the very idea of compassion? This question kept haunting me as I read Alexandra Popoff’s new biography of Alisa Rosenbaum, better known to the world as Ayn Rand. The life traced out in Popoff’s retelling (also discernible between the lines of Rand’s own novels and public pronouncements) conforms in broad outlines to what the literary critic Parul Sehgal dubbed “the trauma plot,” when violence a long way back is revealed at the end to ac
The debate between Craig Biddle and Stephen Hicks concerning Open versus Close Objectivism took place last month in Belgrade, Serbia. Biddle took the Closed position and Hicks the Open position. I enjoyed the debate and thought each side presented his position well. There wasn’t the rancor that one might expect for what has often been a contentious issue. For background on the Open versus Closed controversy see here.
Biddle took a reasonable approach. Ayn Rand died in 1982 and the posi
I asked the 'instance' of ChatGPT to just have some brainstorming fun before dinner. I ended up with a bizarre tale told in an ersatz Rand ''voice."
But first, discoveries. What did I find out about ChatGPT? Well, headline: "You can jump back in to earlier chats"!
-- yahbut. This is not news. I just hadn't tried it before, or bathered to read immense How To documents.
So, if you had something like this:
The preserved chat exchanges at the tip of the red arrows are not a u
[Edited January 2 2019 -- to remove or replace dead visual-links]
Long ago Jonathan and I got some good traction out of a tangle of issues related to Global Warming slash Climate Change. I think we are slated to renew or refresh our earlier exchanges. I am going to poke in links to some he-said/he-saids from a few different threads at different times. One feature of the updated software is an automated 'sampling' of a link posted raw. See below.
So this blog entry will be kind of a
I've mentioned the author Frederick Crews a few times on OL** ... and now I am ploughing steadily through his book "Freud, the Making of an Illusion."
It's the kind of book people reserve the word 'magisterial' for, so far. The subject is Freud's story-telling, in essence, and the divergence from the actualities. Crew is the first to exploit the new availability of previously censored or suppressed materials. He has previously rubbished mythic Freud in some earlier work referred to by the
Do you ever get slightly confused by the term "Deep State," or wonder if another person is sensing the same concept as you?
Here's an interesting analytical essay by Mike Lofgren, author of the book "The Deep State."
Anatomy of the Deep State
[NB Dec 17: The code above did not survive the relocation of my web host to HostPapa. The poster to the video and the direct link follow.
https://wsscherk.com/VIDEOCASTS/A11KF/The-Heat-Is-there-a-deep-state-or-shadow-governmen
I am going to have an election aftermath party with one of my study groups, using a Streamlabs "call in" format. This entry will present a 'live' debate watch-along for the Cleveland encounter between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
I'll post the Streamyard link here below, just in case anyone feels the urge to call in and give me (or Biden or Trump or Chris Wallace) a talking-to.
I suspect tonight and the next two debate nights next month will not affect the electorate -- except
Styx the election observer poses a question and answers it today. In the run-up to the 2018 midterms, he began to offer an estimation of Democratic House wins ... and won that Election Night prognostication game with H A Goodman, who figured on a Red Wave.
Styx assesses the chances of a Biden win at 15% ...
The phrase "all polls are wrong" was a cool hinge-point of argument last year, as the Trump train rolled on ...
Yesterday a Democrat penned an interesting article at The Hill. It didn't say that "all polls are wrong," but that surveys of President Trump's popularity in the USA are flawed and in no way indicative. In other words ... Why the polls are still wrong. Here's a few excerpts from the article:
The Penn article also received some pushback, in this instance from Philip Bump o
Six fun (sad/awful/false/infuriating) stories emerged from the swamp in the last couple of days. Peter Taylor noted elsewhere on the site some vows made by Attorney-General Jeff Sessions on the issue of "leaks." Some of the usual suspects have pretended that this is a "Threat" against the noble profession of prostitution journalism.
The strongest or least-false coverage of this issue from that point of view may be from font of evul Politico ... in a story called Jeff Sessions' Attack on th
[Link to kerfufflage on the main stage] Three unfinished 'draft' blog entries had been posted into abeyance, had been put off to the future, which future was January 1 2020. The entries were glops of quoted material (some of which contained a stupid 'turn Trump to Drumpf' JS routine) ... and I had no pertinent plan to revisit them. When I deleted them, I also deleted a number of comments that were attached to at least one of the entries.
I had thought there was no way of saving those comm
No one knows at the moment how the impeachment process will end up, though OL members will generally have in memory the Nixon and Clinton impeachment efforts for use in comparing and contrasting. At the present moment, nose-counting wonks have counted noses, providing spreadsheets of current House members who have indicated they support an impeachment inquiry. There is enough to agree articles of impeachment at last count -- if the process gets that far (see also the Politico breakdown of impe
"Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives.
• Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information.
•
My second test is also awful ... long, choppy, echoey, but I fear not [added February 2]
_______________________________
I have been fussing with technical impediments for a few days -- with the end of the fuss a more-success-than-fail test of streaming video live from Chilliwack. It is still awful, laggy, popping here and there, distorting audio, skipping frames, refusing to play video so I can hear it ... but with some more fussing and rehearsal, and more script card
Three hundred and twenty-five days until the first chance Democratic electors have to select a candidate (beginning with the Iowa caucuses), plus the time between that caucus and the end of the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee Wisconsin on July 16 2020.
I'll be using this topic thread to note various peaks of excitement between now and then. I don't think there will be much excitement on the Republican side -- since barring unforeseen circumstances, President Trump is assured th
The Real Roots of American Rage | The untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and personal lives—and what we can do about it.
Anger, Averill concluded, is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion. And it does an excellent job of forcing us to listen to and confront problems we might otherwise avoid.
I'd like to open a field of discussion for the QAnon phenomena. Here is where I will post in already existing material presented at OL by members. I'll take direction from comments and from poll answers.
What is Q / QAnon?
Why should anyone on OL pay attention?
Is skepticism justified?
What are the main questions readers have in mind to guide discussion?
No special rules or guidelines for this thread; the OL guidelines are good enough and will apply here. . Pl
One of the items I fish out of the general Russia Russia Russia hoopla is geopolitical strategy. In other words, setting aside the unproven allegations of the Trump-Russia 'collusion' grab-bag, and putting to one side the actual details of the "Russia hack" of the 2016 US presidential election -- leaving the residual "what is this administration's larger strategy with regard to Russia, its hopes and fears, its ambitions."
This is no easy task. The election campaign revealed just a few rules