Mayhew throws down the gauntlet

[9thdoctor]

I can just see some OLers Googling "syrup of ipecac" so they can figure out what the hell your're talking about. 8-)

You know me that well already?

If truth be known, I had to Google it too. Never heard of the stuff. But then I've never been bitten by a snake -- not literally, anyway. 8-)

Syrup of ipecac is not just for snakebite. It's appropriate whenever an emetic is indicated.

Syrup of ipecac is used to induce vomiting. Just the thought of Comrade Sonia in “Tight leather outfights” nearly serves that purpose, and secret tests of the actual product reportedly had to be halted because of the high rate of dissociative disorders the test subjects developed. Post-test subjects were classed into two categories: Thousand yard stare and Two thousand yard stare. After lengthy rehabilitation the only lingering symptoms were utter disdain for anything to do with Objectivism, and newly developed identification with the work of a contemporary French writer named Houellebecq.

Syrup of ipecac remains the preferable method of inducing vomiting because of greatly reduced risk of the user developing such PTSD symptoms.

EDIT: I misspelled Houellebecq, and Dragonfly didn't point it out. You're slipping, man.

Edited April 2, 2010 by Ninth Doctor

[Rich Engle]

I thought she was in one of those G. Gordon Liddy calendars. March, 06--look at the far end of the firing range. A little mushy but you can still make out the tightlipped sneer.

[Roger Bissell]

I love how he built up to that gotcha. I'd never heard of The Objectivist Calendar before either, and if he didn't cite it how should you know about it? And that's the only example he gives, the only defence he offers to how many? 30-50 examples you've transcribed? I bet this case, the one about the Nazi march in Skokie, IL is another example: http://www.objectivi...indpost&p=90522

As of today, I've transcribed and posted 141 answers (as they appear on the recordings; a few of these were chopped into smaller pieces by Mayhew).

Most of these I transcribed from scratch on my own. For the Q&A from the 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism series, I've been using Roger Bissell's transcriptions, after checking every word against the recording. Roger's transcriptions are high quality, and they have made my work much easier, but I've still ended up making many small corrections to them.

Robert, I'm glad that my transcription of Peikoff's 1976 Objectivism lectures was as accurate as you have found it to be. I do try to check my work the best I can, but I confess that I miss a few plurals, past tenses, and the like -- and I don't include grunts, stammers, stutters, etc., either. :-)

And just for the record, the side-by-side I presented in the thread "Why Nobody Takes PARC Seriously Anymore" was based ~not~ on my own transcription of Rand's 1971 comments, but on one posted even earlier in thate thread by Bill Perry. I ~assumed~ it was an accurate and COMPLETE transcript, which it was not. My bad. I also had trouble making the Rand vs. Mayhew "Rand" appear side by side, so in jerry-rigging two columns when I reposted it, I inadvertently and unintentionally put the last line of material from "Column A" at the bottom of "Column B" by mistake. Again, my bad.

However, in regard to Mayhew's nonsense about letting "incompetent dogs lie" (quoting from memory), I must say that his use of that old phrase contains a rather unfortunate (for him) choice of words, although not in the sense he intended. Lie, indeed!

I would rather be an "incompetent dog" inadvertently and unintentionally making an error in trying to provide a concrete example of Mayhew's distortions and misrepresentations of Rand's ideas and comments, than a ~competent dog~, deliberately and intentionally airbrushing or outright omitting Rand's most embarrassing public utterances.

I wish we had an emoticon for "pants on fire."

And Robert, to you and Michael, I salute you for your courage and honesty and ~caring~ that people know the ~truth~ about Rand's ideas and statements, not the sanitized, bowdlerized pablum that Mayhew and others would prefer that we be served. If Fair Use means ~anything~, it means that what you are doing, in the name of truth and scholarship about Rand, is entirely legal, moral, and deserving of the widest audience possible. Not attempts by the barking dogs of orthodoxy to intimidate and silence you.

Keep on, gentlemen. Don't let Comrade Sonia and her henchpersons shut you down.

REB

[Dragonfly]

Hsieh? Isn't that that health and diet nut? Someone should tell her that continuously kissing Peikoff's ass is very unhealthy.

[Rich Engle]

Hsieh? Isn't that that health and diet nut? Someone should tell her that continuously kissing Peikoff's ass is very unhealthy.

If you edit out words 5-7 of your first sentence, yeah, you pretty much have it.

She's racked up quite a few nasties, but how she dealt with NB, and even more heinously, what she did to Chris Sciabarra...that was just IT for a lot of us. To quote one of Hunter Thompson's letters, "If I had the time I would track you down and drive a wooden stake into your forehead."

[Robert Campbell]

Roger,

You're right ... what kinds of slyness has our "competent dog" been up to?

We still don't know what directives Leonard Peikoff gave to Robert Mayhew.

We still don't know who transcribed the tapes of Rand's answers to questions, or whether Mayhew checked any transcriptions made by others against the tapes.

We don't even know how many of the answers were edited by Ayn Rand herself, since Mayhew didn't announce in his Introduction to the book that any of them were, and he remains cagey about the identities of those answers now (my best guess is that four of them were handled this way [in fact, there were 13—see below]).

As for the obviousness of edited answers being published in The Objectivist Calendar, we really are talking about obscure here. A check of WorldCat reveals that one university library has the Calendar on paper (but not nearly all 20 issues). By contrast, La Hsieh used to run down the quality of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies because not enough libraries were carrying it: presently there are 14 on paper and 69 electronically.

One ought to keep sensitive body parts out of reach when a "competent dog" is the vicinity.

Robert Campbell

Note added and revissed April 2, 2010: According to Dennis Hardin, answers by Ayn Rand appeared in 12 issues of The Objectivist Calendar. So there are others besides the three that Mayhew alluded to, and the amplified answer about Nazis in Skokie. I've now received scans of all of them from Dennis, to whom many thanks are due. There are 13 answers edited by Rand herself. Over the next couple of days, I will identify these individually on the Rewrite Squad thread.

[Roger Bissell]

Roger,

You're right ... what kinds of slyness has our "competent dog" been up to?

We still don't know what directives Leonard Peikoff gave to Robert Mayhew.

We still don't know who transcribed the tapes of Rand's answers to questions, or whether Mayhew checked any transcriptions made by others against the tapes.

We don't even know how many of the answers were edited by Ayn Rand herself, since Mayhew didn't announce in his Introduction to the book that any of them were, and he remains cagey about the identities of those answers now (my best guess is that four of them were handled this way).

As for the obviousness of edited answers being published in The Objectivist Calendar, we really are talking about obscure here. A check of WorldCat reveals that one university library has the Calendar on paper (but not nearly all 20 issues). By contrast, La Hsieh used to run down the quality of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies because not enough libraries were carrying it: presently it's 14 on paper and 69 electronically.

One ought to keep sensitive body parts out of reach when a "competent dog" is the vicinity.

Robert Campbell

All your points are well taken, Robert.

Luckily for you and Michael and the truth, the barks of the "competent dog" and Comrade Sonia and their henchcritters are worse than their bites.

I like to think of you and Objectivist Living as the salt shaker that must be kept handy at all times, when reading emails, discussion posts, and (regrettably) even published works by these people. (More than a grain of salt often being needed.) ;)

REB

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Down in Brazil when I was married into the Arabian culture, there was a poetic saying they used all the time. I used to like it because it sounded almost Randian.

The dogs bark and the caravan passes.

That's how I see it with truth in the free market.

Michael

[Neil Parille]

Even if all the answers were revised by Rand herself, Mayhew's failure to mention this makes the book misleading. Rand comes across as kinder, gentler, informed and more polished than she was. This is just another piece of propaganda designed to make Rand "better" than she was.

-Neil Parille

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

There are a couple of points regarding the recent flare-up I want on record.

Earlier in this thread I characterized Mayhew's scholarship as "shoddy." Since this can mean several things, I want to make my meaning clear. I don't mean shoddy in the sense that James Valliant's scholarship is shoddy, where he was just plain sloppy and lazy in getting quotes right. I don't believe that Mayhew is either sloppy or lazy. The shoddiness I refer to with him concerns his results, not his intent or research competence. To the reader, it's the same, though. The reader is getting a misrepresentation of someone else's words. That's why the scholarship is shoddy. I can think of a few other adjectives, but I'll stay with shoddy.

On another point, Hsieh claimed that I despise her as she despises me. She's wrong. I don't despise her. (I do despise Objectivist Liar and Hater Lindsay Perigo, but that involves some other values.) I'm only saying this because people reading her stuff might believe that I have great feeling for her. I don't.

Frankly, I don't feel much emotion toward Hsieh at all. Since I wanted to correct this here, just now as I wrote, it also made me curious. What did I feel about her? I introspected a bit and here's what I came up with. All of it is pretty distant inside my world of priorities, but here it is.

Distaste for her maliciousness and true-believer mentality. (I flare up when she tries to damage good people, but that involves more defense than offense--more my love of the good people than my hatred of the bad.) Empathy for her industriousness. And curiousity in a specimen-studying sense.

This last is the strongest long-term emotion I have about her. For example, I once read something by her on humor where she wanted to destroy her natural playful spontaneity with respect to certain morally prohibited things and reprogram her subconscious so she only found morally permitted things funny. I don't see that as any kind of improvement, but instead as a mutilation.

Finding things funny in life involves a whole lot more than the external thing that prompts the mirth, and even externally, there is context galore to consider.

I found all of this this missing in her musings about how she needs to do her reprogramming. Instead, her focus was on whether the thing she was laughing at was good or evil and how she needed to make sure she only laughed at evil. Such a gross misunderstanding of human nature naturally makes me curious. But it's also like what I feel about people who go overboard with body-piercing. I get creeped out. What makes a person want to mutilate himself/herself like that?

Another issue is observing her progress in her podcasts. I have only listened to a few, but there has been improvement in delivery. She also came up with a cute little bongo roll signature to change gears topic-wise. My curiousity about this comes from the fact that I have worked in showbiz.

But the thing I find really curious is her "Dear Abby" focus while trying to imitate Peikoff's podcasts. (In her first, she even slurred words in Peikoff's manner.) This includes some really weird advice, like, for instance, what is the moral thing to do to overcome shyness. Maybe she is more serious and less weird in other podcasts. I am evaluating based only on what little I have listened to. And that was a while ago.

There's a bit more from my introspection--none of it very important--but I have things to do. Enough about Hsieh for now.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

There are a couple of points regarding the recent flare-up I want on record.

Earlier in this thread I characterized Mayhew's scholarship as "shoddy." Since this can mean several things, I want to make my meaning clear. I don't mean shoddy in the sense that James Valliant's scholarship is shoddy, where he was just plain sloppy and lazy in getting quotes right. I don't believe that Mayhew is either sloppy or lazy. The shoddiness I refer to with him concerns his results, not his intent or research competence. To the reader, it's the same, though. The reader is getting a misrepresentation of someone else's words. That's why the scholarship is shoddy. I can think of a few other adjectives, but I'll stay with shoddy.

On another point, Hsieh claimed that I despise her as she despises me. She's wrong. I don't despise her. (I do despise Objectivist Liar and Hater Lindsay Perigo, but that involves some other values.) I'm only saying this because people reading her stuff might believe that I have great feeling for her. I don't.

Frankly, I don't feel much emotion toward Hsieh at all. Since I wanted to correct this here, just now as I wrote, it also made me curious. What did I feel about her? I introspected a bit and here's what I came up with. All of it is pretty distant inside my world of priorities, but here it is.

Distaste for her maliciousness and true-believer mentality. (I flare up when she tries to damage good people, but that involves more defense than offense--more my love of the good people than my hatred of the bad.) Empathy for her industriousness. And curiousity in a specimen-studying sense.

This last is the strongest long-term emotion I have about her. For example, I once read something by her on humor where she wanted to destroy her natural playful spontaneity with respect to certain morally prohibited things and reprogram her subconscious so she only found morally permitted things funny. I don't see that as any kind of improvement, but instead as a mutilation.

Finding things funny in life involves a whole lot more than the external thing that prompts the mirth, and even externally, there is context galore to consider.

I found all of this this missing in her musings about how she needs to do her reprogramming. Instead, her focus was on whether the thing she was laughing at was good or evil and how she needed to make sure she only laughed at evil. Such a gross misunderstanding of human nature naturally makes me curious. But it's also like what I feel about people who go overboard with body-piercing. I get creeped out. What makes a person want to mutilate himself/herself like that?

Another issue is observing her progress in her podcasts. I have only listened to a few, but there has been improvement in delivery. She also came up with a cute little bongo roll signature to change gears topic-wise. My curiousity about this comes from the fact that I have worked in showbiz.

But the thing I find really curious is her "Dear Abby" focus while trying to imitate Peikoff's podcasts. (In her first, she even slurred words in Peikoff's manner.) This includes some really weird advice, like, for instance, what is the moral thing to do to overcome shyness. Maybe she is more serious and less weird in other podcasts. I am evaluating based only on what little I have listened to. And that was a while ago.

There's a bit more from my introspection--none of it very important--but I have things to do. Enough about Hsieh for now.

Michael,

I go to Noodle Food every week or so and read her and her husband's postings. Many of them are quite good and interesting. I seldom read any of the comments. Paul particularly really seems to have his head on straight. I don't listen to the podcasts; I've little time for oral material from anybody when I could cover it much faster if it were written down. What she shares with Leonard Peikoff is some compulsion to be an authority in areas where she really isn't. And you'd think her doctor spouse would caution her about the possible negative effects over time of her extremely high protein diet.

She would have all and sundry believe she read one article by Nathaniel Branden and that was all she needed to evaluate and understand the man and his work and therefore justify her own break, a la Ayn Rand, with him et al. and align herself with the ARIan crowd, when she was actually motivated by the need for a public purification ritual necessarily repeated with Chris Sciabarra. What she was really doing was signing off on her personal and professional independence, which is the essential characteristic of the Orthodoxy--and any orthodoxy, which had been also demanded by Ayn Rand way back when.

At least Lindsay Perigo is much more independent. He'll use and abuse anybody albeit of course not everybody. It was interesting to see his need to dominate even James Valliant played out in real time. He doesn't care who he drives off, bottom line, and he's driven off many.

--Brant

who/whom: never could understand the rule

[Neil Parille]

I don't know if anyone has referenced these, but Mayhew is not the most careful scholar --

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2005/07/the_importance_.html

http://mises.org/journals/jls/19_4/19_4_7.pdf

That being said, there's only one Jim Valliant.

-Neil Parille

[Robert Campbell]

Neil,

Thanks for posting these links.

I'll be commenting on Bob Mayhew's scholarship later on.

Robert Campbell

[jeffrey smith]

--Brant

who/whom: never could understand the rule

Who does

Whom gets done.

Therefore always be a who and try not to be a whom

Jeffrey S.

[9thdoctor]

Empathy for her industriousness.

I would suggest that it’s actually exhibitionism. I started ignoring her on MDOP, I remember she was going through Rand’s non-fiction for the first time, and was pretty clueless. My thought was that this girl needs to stop writing these long posts, and take the time to read the damn books. I don’t remember if she was posting daily or what, but it was way too much. Maybe it was the only social interaction she was having. Or, maybe it was just good old fashion social metaphysics. Who knows.

[Robert Campbell]

ND,

I used to know Diana Hsieh pretty well. She can be highly industrious when she wants to be.

But the exhibitionistic aspect is there, too.

After she made her move toward the Ayn Rand Institute and started preparing her public denunciation of Chris Sciabarra, she admitted that she had read only the first half of The Russian Radical.

There's no reason why she couldn't have read the entire book—it's not like anything in it was over her head. I think she wanted to create the impression of knowing more than she was willing to expend the effort to acquire.

In the ARI orbit, she can promote books that she hasn't read (and may never get around to reading). They just have to be by ARI authors.

Robert Campbell

[Robert Campbell]

Putting in references to Ayn Rand's editing of 13 of her answers, during the 1976-1978 period, is going to take another day or two.

But I have now annotated the Israel/Kissinger/Solzhenitsyn answer from 1976 that Bob Mayhew took me to task about.

Indeed, much editing was done on the answer by Ayn Rand herself.

But afterwards further editing was done on pieces of the answer by Bob Mayhew.

And in the process Mayhew took an addendum to the Solzhenitsyn part that Rand had flagged as such, and made it look as though she said it on stage at the Ford Hall Forum.

Gack!

You can see for yourself here:

http://www.objectivi...indpost&p=82902

I think Mayhew preferred not to let readers of Ayn Rand Answers know about the items that Rand had edited. Not when he was sometimes doing his own editing on top of her edits.

Robert Campbell

[Rich Engle]

Bob, who I have always admired and had a good feeling about...he is a great scholar, and a better writer.

I look at all this and, you know what it looks like? Hobbyists. Hobbyists, working with fixed data. Dead horse beating. Down to small edits. It is thoroughly ridiculous and time-consuming, beyond belief.

I am starting to wonder why I am even looking at it, and I have been looking at things like this for a very long time.

And THAT is why Objectivism is so fucked-up: painful, needless attention to the miniscule.

It's fucked, I'm out. And won't be missed.

Go for another fifty pages: that's what is done.

[9thdoctor]

Bob, who I have always admired and had a good feeling about...he is a great scholar, and a better writer.

Who’s Bob? Campbell or Mayhew or someone else? No offence, but this reads like a product of either the Broken Compass or the Gremlin Boogie.

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8355&view=findpost&p=92852

[Guyau]

I see you, Rich.

To the serene flame.

[Robert Campbell]

Rich and Stephen,

Sure, it's time-consuming. Not to mention, frequently tedious.

If you're not interested, no offense taken. There are plenty of other threads on this site.

Hobbyism or whatever you want to call it, it's a small part of what I do.

For that matter, it's a small part of what Bob Mayhew does.

I got an email last night from a guy in Canada, who'd come across my music history site. An old lady in the neighborhood, who'd met her late husband at a dance where a Gladys Palmer record was played and had lost the 78 in a move, wanted to hear the song again. We figured out how to get a big audio file through to his ISP, I sent it to him, and she heard her song again.

You could call that hobbyism, too.

Robert Campbell

[George H. Smith]

I got an email last night from a guy in Canada, who'd come across my music history site.

Are you referring to the website for the Red Saunders Research Foundation? (See http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/rsrf.html ) I just posted this link on the JazzWestCoast list.

If you are referring to some other site, please provide a link.

Ghs

[Roger Bissell]

ND,

I used to know Diana Hsieh pretty well. She can be highly industrious when she wants to be.

But the exhibitionistic aspect is there, too.

After she made her move toward the Ayn Rand Institute and started preparing her public denunciation of Chris Sciabarra, she admitted that she had read only the first half of The Russian Radical.

There's no reason why she couldn't have read the entire book—it's not like anything in it was over her head. I think she wanted to create the impression of knowing more than she willing to expend the effort to acquire.

I recall fondly, and with no guilt, when I realized just how wonderful and important Chris's Russian Radical was, after reading only 35-40 pages -- and proceeded to write a review of it to post online! Of course, I continued reading avidly, and gratefully, and finished the book within several days of writing the review, rather than setting aside and assuming that I had "gotten it."

But I in fact ~did~ get it in a fairly short time. That is how well made the book is.

What amazes me is that so many intelligent people were ~not~ able to get Russian Radical. It is not rocket science. It's just clear, mind-opening philosophy, that (like Rand's writing) blazes a trail where others have not gone before.

Perhaps that explains it. I ~do~ know a number of intelligent Objectivists, who are simply unwilling or unable or too fearful to think outside the box of Randian orthodoxy. (Ordinarily, that is not a problem -- only when they become "gatekeepers." Do you hear me, James Taggart?)(No, I will not explain that last outburst.)

I don't know which is worse: missing out on the transformative experience of reading and assimilating Chris's ideas in Russian Radical, or devoting so much time and energy instead to trying to convince others of the manifest falsehoods that his ideas are without merit and that he is a corrupt blighter.

But then, clenching one's own mind shut and trying to destroy the creations and characters of others do seem to run hand in hand in our society -- and in far too much of our own subculture.

REB

[Robert Campbell]

George,

Yes, I meant the Red Saunders Research Foundation link. Thanks for posting it on JazzWestCoast.

There's enough on RSRF to keep me busy...

Robert Campbell

[jeffrey smith]

I recall fondly, and with no guilt, when I realized just how wonderful and important Chris's Russian Radical was, after reading only 35-40 pages -- and proceeded to write a review of it to post online! Of course, I continued reading avidly, and gratefully, and finished the book within several days of writing the review, rather than setting aside and assuming that I had "gotten it."

But I in fact ~did~ get it in a fairly short time. That is how well made the book is.

What amazes me is that so many intelligent people were ~not~ able to get Russian Radical. It is not rocket science. It's just clear, mind-opening philosophy, that (like Rand's writing) blazes a trail where others have not gone before.

Perhaps that explains it. I ~do~ know a number of intelligent Objectivists, who are simply unwilling or unable or too fearful to think outside the box of Randian orthodoxy. (Ordinarily, that is not a problem -- only when they become "gatekeepers." Do you hear me, James Taggart?)(No, I will not explain that last outburst.)

I don't know which is worse: missing out on the transformative experience of reading and assimilating Chris's ideas in Russian Radical, or devoting so much time and energy instead to trying to convince others of the manifest falsehoods that his ideas are without merit and that he is a corrupt blighter.

But then, clenching one's own mind shut and trying to destroy the creations and characters of others do seem to run hand in hand in our society -- and in far too much of our own subculture.

REB

I read Russian Radical a few months ago, and am quite puzzled why anyone would object to it. But of course, I am not an Objectivist, much less an Orthodox Objectivist. The philosophical aspects seem too obvious to be argued in principle: Rand was exposed to a variety of philosophical influences in Russia and in her early years here in the USA, and it's helpful to see what they are so we can see what she changed or invented, and the implications of those

changes and inventions. The biographical aspects were also interesting, although now with the publication of the Heller and Burns volumes, they may have been superseded.

Jeffrey S.