The Passion of James Valliant's Criticism, Part V


Neil Parille

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Jim,

Have you ever heard of a term called "the goddess premise" when someone refers to Ayn Rand?

Do you know where that term came from?

Michael

No, but then again Rand wasn't #1 in my pantheon of heroes growing up. I always wanted to study physics with Richard Feynman at Caltech. Three things happened to that: Feynman died and I went out to Caltech and I found I thought the people were stuffy and I discovered I was pretty mediocre at physics :-).

I loved Richard Feynman, but I would never think of him as a god. I feel the same way about Rand.

Jim

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Jim,

Rand wrote about the "goddess premise" in her journal entries in PARC. She did not agree with the fact that she was seen as a goddess, but she was aware of it enough to write about it.

Actually, she could have easily changed that perception had she wanted to. Only martyrs cannot because they are dead. No one keeps a "god/goddess" prestige if they are really against it. (Look at history and you will see many examples.)

Since Robert had said that Rand herself, through "some of her writings and utterances," encouraged belief in her as a morally perfect being, I thought you disagreed with that part.

Which is why I asked.

Michael

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Out of Objectivist Liar Lindsay Perigo's mouth:

What you're not facing up to is that no one on the SOLO side would do such a thing; everyone on the O-Lying side would.

Now someone over on SLOP has deleted a post by Robert Campbell. The post certainly did not grow legs and walk off the forum thread. If this was done by Perigo, it counts as gross hypocrisy and pandering to Grande Dame of St. Referee Ellen. If it was not done by him and the person stays anonymous, this is the kissing-cousin to forgery. Does one of these paragons of virtue "on the SOLO side" who would never do such a thing fess up?

Of course not.

Everyone is denying. Starting with:

I Saw It.

Submitted by Lindsay Perigo on Tue, 2009-06-09 01:58.

And now I can't. I've no idea what happened to it. I certainly didn't remove it. I'm baffled. Ross, any idea what might have happened?

:)

And the post that was there is no longer. A is suddenly not A on Solo Passion.

Michael

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I should add, however, that Peikoff has said that he will discuss the book. Peikoff discussing something like PARC in a neutral forum is about as likely as finding a '57 Chevy on the moon. And Mr. Lawrence wants to interfere with this world-historical event?

One time Keith Moon, drummer in The Who was so effed up in the middle of a show (real story, not the propo) that the roadies had to go in there when he was playing double-bass kit and shoot him in both ankles with speed to get him through the show.

That's about what it would take if they trot out Poor Leonard.

MSK: I also suggest that you eliminate keystrokes (maybe you are already using a macro) in reference to Objectivist Liar Lindsey Perigo and change it over to my standard reference, which is The Creature<tm> .

I believe this is more efficient, and, at this point, a better description in that it is more concisely to-point.

Hey...he never accepted my debate challenge. Probably couldn't get any horny goat weed in time.

rde

right up down left that's how you conduct oh wait i mighta got that bakkerds...

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Rich,

Objectivist Liar Lindsay Perigo wanted a distinctive Objectivist title so badly that he traveled halfway around the world to lie, right outside a TAS conference. He went there to try to steal the public from TAS and lie to their faces as an Objectivist heavy-hitter. (His ineptitude at pulling this off does not annul the intent.) Then, of course, cover the lies with cussing, especially about Barbara.

So I decided to crown him.

Long live Objectivist Liar Lindsay Perigo!

Long live Objectivist Liar Lindsay Perigo!

Long live Objectivist Liar Lindsay Perigo!

Er...

Gooble goble, gooble goble...

We accept him, we accept him...

Gooble gobble gooble gobble...

Liar Lindsay, Liar Lindsay...

Gooble gobble gooble gobble...

We accept him, we accept him...

Gooble gobble gooble gobble...

See?

Objectivist Liar Lindsay Perigo.

How could it be any different?

:)

Michael

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Michael... I am truly moved by that powerful prose. :sick:

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Oh, I never disagreed with your premise.

I want to write a new tune called "The Evidence Song."

Look, you can extract, analyzye, archive, categorize, whatever.

But any way you cut it, a dick is a dick.

He's a dick.

Meaning, not as good as an "asshole," because he is less effective. He's just a dick.

It's like one of those rashes where you go spend money you don't have on creams and you don't know why, because you are considering the possibility that it might be better to die of itching before spending money on the invasion itself.

But I don't, because I find him so $%#^ reprehensible. Only a few have ever invaded my dermis to his level. That's where the fighting starts, and I'm real good at that.

Edited by Rich Engle
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Cross-post, in case of further hinkitude over yonder:

Here's a further exchange involving Jim Valliant (aka Pelagius1) and a Wikipedia editor.

Still at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Objectiv...pt_at_a_Summary

Anyone care to itemize what we are talking about here? I'm too lazy to do so, but I'm curious if someone is up for it - how much content is taken from the Brandens' books in Ayn Rand and Objectivism (Ayn Rand)? In the Objectivist Movement article? What I'm fishing for is if there even exists some great wrongs - and if there is, do they even belong in an encyclopedic article - and if they are relevant, are the sources reliable. If we still have them after that scrutiny, does PARC offer us anything that is relevant - if the final question's answer is 'yes,' then we can resume discussion how PARC measures up to wikipedia policy for verifying the specifics. Otherwise there is no need to work this out. --Karbinski (talk) 17:55, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

This is not a whole summary, but stuff like this (from the Ayn Rand article) keeps coming up, again and again:

"Stressing that this 'is not to deny the sophistication or originality of Rand's thought,' Chris Matthew Sciabarra discusses Branden's suggestion that her 'wholesale rejection' of some other viewpoints was due to her 'theatrical, emotional, and abrasive style.' As a polemicist, he [?] argues, she often dismissed her opponents on 'moralistic or psychologistic' grounds, and her broad generalizations often lacked scholarly rigor.[77] For example, Rand has been criticized for her critique of Immanuel Kant. Rand was strongly opposed to certain views she ascribed to Kant, particularly that reason is unable to know reality 'as it is in itself." She considered her philosophy to be the "exact opposite" of Kant's on 'every fundamental issue'.[78] Objectivist philosophers George Walsh and Fred Seddon have both argued that Rand misinterpreted Kant and exaggerated her differences with him.[79][80] According to Seddon, Nathaniel Branden stated that Rand never read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,[81] while Walsh contends that Rand and Kant adhere to many of the same basic positions."

Branden's credibility as a witness against Rand, his alleged "facts," and, most especially, his accusations (and their alleged basis in "fact") of what he calls Rand's moralism and psychologizing are all considered in detail with new evidence in PARC.

And, as participant in the exchange RL removed, I think it also should go as an irrelevant distraction, as well, so I removed it. Pelagius1 (talk) 8 June, 2009.

**********

Notice that Mr. Valliant does not provide evidence that Ayn Rand read the Critique of Pure Reason (if she refused to read A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, what would have persuaded her to read Immanuel Kant's least readable book?).

He just complains about the use of Nathaniel Branden as a source about her not reading it.

Robert Campbell

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Quote: Pelagius1

Mr. Parille has evaded every response by Valliant to each of his nonsensical assertions about the book. His dishonesty and evasion should be ignored, it is baseless in every case. Some of what he writes (take #5) has absolutely nothing to do with the book in question, and illustrate here his wild animus against Rand and Peikoff, which are well-known. No one is likely to waste time or effort responding to a truly "unreliable" source. Pelagius1 (talk) 8 June, 2009.

In my on-line and off-line exchanges with Valliant, his two favorite words to describe me were "dishonest" and "evasion."

I challenge anyone to say with a straight face that Pelagius1 is not James Valliant.

When will The Last Honest Man finally denounce this charade?

-Neil Parille

Edited by Neil Parille
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I see that Richard Lawrence deleted my "10 Questions For Leonard Peikoff" from Wikipedia.

Neil,

When I mentioned the following, I did not grok that RL0919 was Richard Lawrence. Nor did I grok it when I made my comments about Richard.

"Pelagius1," who is either Valliant or spouse (since the IP comes from the Valliant household), posted the Peikoff email and "triumphantly" chimed, "posted with his permission here."

The Wikipedia editors did not seem to be very impressed.

One of them—RL0919 —responded. From what I know of Wikipedia editing policies, I would say his view on the topic of using second hand emails as sources is held by the majority.

To understand his first sentence below, here is what he was talking about. He mentioned that there are some "academics who disdain Rand and do not wish to dignify her with discussion." On the other side, there are "prominent Objectivists (Peikoff, Gotthelf, etc.) who detest the Brandens and prefer not to even mention them in their works." This is the context for the quote.

Regarding the email from Peikoff, this is an example of what I just mentioned. If Peikoff endorses Valliant's book and the claims therein, he has many venues available to him where he could say this. He could publish a review. He could write an essay that includes the use of Valliant as a source. He could mention the book in a radio or tv interview. These would be verifiable references from a reliable source that could be used to bolster the book's status, both on Wikipedia and elsewhere. But that would effectively require him to mention the Brandens in public. So what we get instead is a second-hand posting about a private email. While I personally believe this is probably a legitimate email from Peikoff, it is not independently verifiable unless he confirms it directly in some more trustworthy venue. Which brings us back to the practice of not talking about the Brandens. To put it bluntly, the major-league Objectivists need to either crap or get off the pot on this subject. If they support Valliant's view of the Brandens, they should say so in reputable public venues: reviews in third-party magazines, citations in academic articles, etc. That is what will gain the book status as a reliable source. Private emails aren't going to do the trick. --RL0919 (talk) 17:46, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

I think one sentence above merits repetition:

"To put it bluntly, the major-league Objectivists need to either crap or get off the pot on this subject."

I am pleased to see that my comments about him more or less align with this.

In the interest of fairness, it should be mentioned that Richard not only deleted your letter to Peikoff, when it was put back, he left it in. See the quote below:

I had deleted these last two comments from Neil Parille and Pelagius1, per WP:TPO, on the grounds that the discussion was veering into a heated debate over the subject matter rather than a polite discussion of how to improve the encyclopedia articles. Another user didn't care for that approach and reverted the deletion. So be it. But I do want to reiterate my own comments from the reverted version: this simply isn't the place for debates about the content of Valliant's book or Branden's book. I would strongly encourage Neil and Pelagius1 to take any such discussion to a different forum if they wish to pursue it. --RL0919 (talk) 17:29, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Michael

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Quote: Pelagius1

Mr. Parille has evaded every response by Valliant to each of his nonsensical assertions about the book. His dishonesty and evasion should be ignored, it is baseless in every case. Some of what he writes (take #5) has absolutely nothing to do with the book in question, and illustrate here his wild animus against Rand and Peikoff, which are well-known. No one is likely to waste time or effort responding to a truly "unreliable" source. Pelagius1 (talk) 8 June, 2009.

In my on-line and off-line exchanges with Valliant, his two favorite words to describe me were "dishonest" and "evasion."

I challenge anyone to say with a straight face that Pelagius1 is not James Valliant.

When will The Last Honest Man finally denounce this charade?

-Neil Parille

Sounds like Holly. :)

--Brant

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My replacement for the lost post over at SOLOP. Also cross-posted as insurance against hinkitude.

Robert Campbell

Everybody Makes Presuppositions

The post I previously made about this matter is the one that went disappearo.

I won’t try to replicate the lost version, but the substance should be the same.

Ms. Stuttle won’t quit with her efforts to rewrite everyone’s email communications to her personal satisfaction.

Somehow Leonard Peikoff isn’t supposed to have been able to tell that I was requesting confirmation on his email to Jimmy Wales, from a hashed userid, mysteriously cc’d to me.

Not even when I tried to reach him at 2 different userids.

Ms. Stuttle goes so far as to declare my statements about the Peikoff-to-Wales missive and my suspicions of it “misleading.”

There’s no other way to put it—her claim is complete bullshit.

If someone I’d cc’d out of the blue asked me to confirm my authorship of an email, I’d be happy to oblige. Leonard Peikoff is more likely to be the target of email forgery than I am, and as a semi-public figure he has more to lose if bogus emails are sent out and attributed to him.

What’s more, I wasn’t going to be needlessly harsh in my first communications ever with Dr. Peikoff. I figured it would be better not to say, “Authenticate this email at once, or I shall proclaim it a brazen imposture and a scurrilous fraud!”

Interestingly, I’ve now heard from Jimmy Wales. He cc’d me on his response to Dr. Peikoff, then sent me a separate short note along the lines of “Do I know you from somewhere? What do you have to do with any of this?”

Meanwhile, Ms. Stuttle has to rely on several presuppositions of her own:

(1) That Leonard Peikoff received one or both of my emails back to him.

(2) That if he received them he read either or both of them.

(3) That if he read either or both of them he determined that no reply was necessary because I wasn’t jumping up and down in my request for authentication.

In fact, no one on this board knows whether any of (1)-(3) is true. (Unless it’s Amy Peikoff and she hasn’t shared it with us).

Everybody makes presuppositions.

Robert Campbell

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Peikoff just put the email that was CC'd to Robert on his site.

See the note to the podcast for June 8, 2009 at:

http://www.peikoff.com/

Now something official is up.

Incidentally, Wikipedia has a technical term for when a call is made on another website to change its editing, but I can't remember what it is. Peikoff's call is his "effort to reverse Wikipedia’s decision in this issue." I don't know if Wikipedia will consider this to be the same thing.

Michael

EDIT: Someone just suggested to me that the term was Canvassing. Although close, I don't think this is it. I distinctly remember reading a rule or guideline about posting a call on other websites for people to make edits on Wikipedia to influence the content of an article.

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Brant,

It could be Valliant's wife, but I have read a lot authored by Valliant himself using those adjectives for Neil. I would have to look (and waste needless time), but I can source them if you like.

Michael

Oh, no. Please don't waste your time.

--Brant

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There is a point in Dr. Peikoff's email to Mr. Wales that I want to address, since it is an erroneous presumption. There are actually several, but the one that directly pertains to me is the one that I want to address.

Dr. Peikoff stated (on the note to the June 8, 2009 podcast), referring to Barbara Branden:

Surely such an individual and her claque have a transparent motive to kill this book.

As one of the owners of the online forum where Barbara Branden posts, I think it is reasonable to assume that I am not just a member of her "claque," but one of the prominent members.

In that capacity, I want to make it clear that I have no motive, transparent or otherwise, to "kill this book" (PARC). My motive is and was to discredit the garbage in it.

Contrary to killing the book, I have no objection whatsoever to PARC being cited in Wikipedia articles. I think it should be cited and read since it provides a very clear and ugly view of the monkeyshines in the Objectivist subcommunity—ones that have to stop.

I merely provide an online place and encouragement for objections and contrary proof to the the countless intentional falsifications, items of incorrect information, and examples of smarm and sleaze peppered throughout PARC to see the light of day.

In fact, I believe it is important for people to use their own minds, not the canned opinions constantly presented by Branden haters—or even any opinion presented by me and those who agree with me.

May many people—and that includes any individual whatsoever anywhere on earth—using their own minds look at the material in PARC and the method by which is is presented. Then look at the well-documented objections to the large number of accuracy problems, outright errors, poor scholarship and irrational epistemology used in writing it. Then look at Dr. Peikoff's public statement (on the note to the June 8, 2009 podcast):

As Ayn Rand’s executor, heir, and longtime personal friend, I will testify in any forum to the accuracy of Mr. Valliant’s book.

Then may they draw their own conclusions.

I predict that history is not going to be kind to this.

Michael

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Continuing with the cross-posts:

Publication at Peikoff.com

Well, we know for sure now that the Peikoff-to-Wales email was real.

But Leonard Peikoff didn't publicize it until Jimmy Wales had told him, in effect, that based on the information he had he was not going to intervene in the Wikipedia editors' decision. (Jimmy Wales emailed Dr. Peikoff Sunday evening, cc'ing me.)

There were a couple of things Mr. Wales suggested that Dr. Peikoff could do, to promote the book's reliability as a source. Instead, Dr. Peikoff just published his email of May 29.

Robert Campbell

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Since Dr. Peikoff so poorly understands what the opposition to Mr. Valliant's opus is really about, I want to second Michael's statement:

Contrary to killing the book, I have no objection whatsoever to PARC being cited in Wikipedia articles. I think it should be cited and read since it provides a very clear and ugly view of the monkeyshines in the Objectivist subcommunity—ones that have to stop.

I merely provide an online place and encouragement for objections and contrary proof to the the countless intentional falsifications, items of incorrect information, and examples of smarm and sleaze peppered throughout PARC to see the light of day.

After all, I have cited the book in a journal article and in a book chapter, while among ARIan authors, the mean number of citations in print to Mr. Valliant's book is apparently equal to 0.

Robert Campbell

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It probably wasn't a smart move for Peikoff to publicly post his Wikipedia letter on his website without a note correcting his comments about suspecting that Barbara was an instigator of the Wikipedia discussion about PARC. By now it's old information that Barbara had nothing to do with it, and that those who accused her of having anything to do with it were careless in jumping to conclusions. Peikoff's posting of the letter this late in the game without addendum makes it look like he's either way behind the times, unconcerned with the truth of the matter, willfully making speculations which have been demonstrated to be untrue, and/or that he can be rather easily misled by gossip from very unreliable sources.

J

Edited by Jonathan
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The "tell" was that his(?) communication was unclear in the first place. If I write an email, I sign it.

You can find me anytime, and, no, I'm not too "busy" to do so. I am busy, but in these matters, being straightforward is a base requirement.

Were I a negotiator, I would say this behavior wastes valuable time.

Whenever someone runs a time-dodge, it lights up my radar.

And all this, in a supposed world of total honesty. It sickens me.

rde

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If The Creature<tm> finally kicks it (and I don't wish this upon him, because I prefer Time to have its way with him), the worst challenge I will have is to outdo this obituary. Clearly, the same sentiment. I've posted this many times before, but this one is clearly ~my~ sentiment. Nixon, of course, was much more interesting. It is worth rereading, in this context.

___

From Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994

HE WAS A CROOK

by Hunter S. Thompson

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."

---Revelation 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise -- a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director -- who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says -- and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

Edited by Rich Engle
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Jim,

Rand wrote about the "goddess premise" in her journal entries in PARC. She did not agree with the fact that she was seen as a goddess, but she was aware of it enough to write about it.

Actually, she could have easily changed that perception had she wanted to. Only martyrs cannot because they are dead. No one keeps a "god/goddess" prestige if they are really against it. (Look at history and you will see many examples.)

Since Robert had said that Rand herself, through "some of her writings and utterances," encouraged belief in her as a morally perfect being, I thought you disagreed with that part.

Which is why I asked.

Michael

Interesting, I'm amazed that I missed that, but there is a whole set of NBI experiences I don't connect with at all. Part of the reason is so much of my life has been in math and the sciences. I think part of "the goddess premise" thing is that many people who read lots of philosophy and try to turn themselves into pretzels trying to understand it think that Rand was one of the few major figures who could write clearly and to the point.

When you get out of philosophy there's lots of genius-level beauty just waiting there. Objectivism's certainly not the only place people have rifts either. If you read Stuart Kaufmann and Murray Gell-Mann they don't reference each other, but they were major figures in the complexity science movement at the Santa Fe Institute.

One thing many people in Objectivism could do to understand how little other people care about this stuff is to go read about schisms in other movements and feel your eyes glaze over.

Jim

Edited by James Heaps-Nelson
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When you get out of philosophy there's lots of genius-level beauty just waiting there.

Jim,

Amen to that.

One thing many people in Objectivism could do to understand how little other people care about this stuff is to go read about schisms in other movements and feel your eyes glaze over.

Double amen.

Just for the record, I know how boring the schism subject is to the general public when I do my thing against Objectivist Liar Lindsay Perigo. My purpose is not to sway them. It is to discredit Perigo's efforts—within the subculture—when he tries to slime productive people. A contrary voice needs to be present for people to receive a different input to be offered a choice. Otherwise, since most people are too busy with their own affairs to do much research, they tend to go along with the trashing.

That's just human nature. Boring for outsiders. But often very painful for the one being trashed.

And even then, sometimes the poison and damage ooze to outside the subculture, like the NZ government's suspension of Jim Peron's visa over a misguided publication a few decades old that he took part in. Somebody has to stand up to that kind malice.

Who?

Whoever wants to step up to the plate.

I stepped up.

Michael

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Yeah, what he said.

The best thing that pile of gelatinous goo could ever do for himself is take that site down and go slink off somewhere.

I've said it before...of all his crap, the worst thing about him (and he knows it inside) is that he is a coward.

As if all his affected, peckish bird-droppings weren't enough.

He could partially redeem himself by walking away, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

In the meantime, bring it on, dough-boy.

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Jim,

Rand wrote about the "goddess premise" in her journal entries in PARC. She did not agree with the fact that she was seen as a goddess, but she was aware of it enough to write about it.

Actually, she could have easily changed that perception had she wanted to. Only martyrs cannot because they are dead. No one keeps a "god/goddess" prestige if they are really against it. (Look at history and you will see many examples.)

Since Robert had said that Rand herself, through "some of her writings and utterances," encouraged belief in her as a morally perfect being, I thought you disagreed with that part.

Which is why I asked.

Michael

Interesting, I'm amazed that I missed that, but there is a whole set of NBI experiences I don't connect with at all. Part of the reason is so much of my life has been in math and the sciences. I think part of "the goddess premise" thing is that many people who read lots of philosophy and try to turn themselves into pretzels trying to understand it think that Rand was one of the few major figures who could write clearly and to the point.

When you get out of philosophy there's lots of genius-level beauty just waiting there. Objectivism's certainly not the only place people have rifts either. If you read Stuart Kaufmann and Murray Gell-Mann they don't reference each other, but they were major figures in the complexity science movement at the Santa Fe Institute.

One thing many people in Objectivism could do to understand how little other people care about this stuff is to go read about schisms in other movements and feel your eyes glaze over.

Jim

That's interesting. Kaufmann's Origins of Order is brilliant. What did that bastard Gell-Mann do to piss him off?

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