DavidMcK

'Toilers of the Sea' is my very favorite of Hugo's. I had some trouble with 'Les' but managed to make it through it; Jean Valjean made it all worth while, but 'Toilers' reminds me of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata..clean and pure and concise and quite wonderful (except for the ending).

There are so many quotes from Eric Hoffer: An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head. Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself. Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature. Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation. Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem. Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak. Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Eric Hoffer worked as a longshoreman (unloading and loading cargo ships) I believe in San Fran. His other books are just as fascinating, but perhaps not as pithy and concentrated as 'True Believer'.

Nathaniel Branden later amended his position to state that if everyone can or is selfish all the time it is the self-interest of fools....I think this was in 'Honoring the Self'. I'm relying on my memory since I don't have a copy of 'Isn't Everyone Selfish' with me, but he said that the fact that all motivated behavior is self-motivated is a 'mere tautology' ; a strange statement for an Objectivist to say since 'A is A' would be considered a 'mere' tautology (the language of the Kantians). Thus his later revision. Though every one is selfish, not everyone strives for enlightened self-interest. There are two components to the formula, the first is volitional, the second differs in degree from individual to individual.

Altruism is the exchange of a higher value for a lower value Self-Interest is an exchange of a lower value for a higher value. Thus if you valued your friends well-being (even though I don't think those kind of drinks are particularly good for you) more than you valued the $1.50 for the drink you might buy your friend a drink. So much of what is self-interest depends on context...how to make it more clear than 'The Fountainhead'? Remember Peter Keating was suppose to be the epitome of selfishness, and Ayn Rand showed that he really wasn't. Roark was suppose to be sacrificing himself for his ideas in architecture, but he was actually deeply self-interested. You need the concepts of actual objective self-interest, pseudo self-interest, self-sacrifice, and pseudo self-sacrifice to make sense of it.

Ok, your right; it wasn't the exact shot but had a plethora of similarities to the one supposed to have been taken by Oswald.

There was a discover channel investigation of the 'magic' bullet recently broadcast, and a sharpshooter replicated the exact shot (using dummies) as the Oswald shot, using a platform 6 stories and behind the limousine. It matched the evidence exactly (including blood splatter).

[\quote]What I find unscientific is the refusal of the Establishment to give due weight to natural causes for the current warming. There is evidence that the current warming trend is related to cloud formation which is driven by cosmic ray input into the upper atmosphere. See: The Chilling Stars: The New Theory of Climate Change by Henrik Svensmark Ba'al Chatzaf Thanks for the reference, if you go to Amazon you will find that some of the readers/commentators were kind enough to provide a compressed synopsis of the theory; fascinating! Almost forgot: welcome Doug.

To what address would we send mail to Google to help Reisman's blog?

It should be added too that Rand wasn't best at detailed comprehensive expositions of philosophical problems (a la Aristotle) but at essentialising the problem. She seemed to regard the more detailed and complete exposition to be grunt work, the hard part was getting at the essence of the problem. Notice that she would simply state that people made choices but it wasn't until Nathaniel Branden came along and offered his more detailed exposition of volitional consciousness that it was just an assertion. The true philosophers love fine distinctions, arguing over the best definition, subtle arguments and so on and sometimes never actually come to the bottom line. The bottom line was just about all that mattered with Rand, and what we need is someone who can do both.

Also to be put in the debit column of the Reagan administration: Sending Marines to Lebanon and then withdrawing after a suicide bomber blew up the Marine baracks (this gave Obama bin Laden tremendous hope that he could change US policy with suicide bombers); allowing Pakistan to get the bomb; tremendous increases in spending; not backing up the most focused smartest person in his administration (David Stockman); The state was much larger after Reagan than before he took office.

I like the way your mind works too Michael; I was interested in your quote about GB 1000 years ago being about where an 8 or 9 year old child is today. I remember in NB 's memoir he said Ayn Rand felt like she had been condemned to live in a society of children....maybe progress consists of a society at large becoming more like an adult individually and as a group...however you might measure that. This looks like a huge subject that could be the basis for a fascinating book.

Carter deregulated the trucking and airline industries, and he bit the political bullet by putting Voelker in the Fed (who then raised the Fed interbank interest rate target to 21% thereby sucking out liquidity and ameliorating inflation). He lost the election due to some of his decisions and the Reagan administration was built on the political corpse of Carter. I wouldn't be as ashamed of voting for Carter in spite of his DOE and other bad programs/decisions as voting for Reagan if I were you.

It is also amazing how many people think this review is the final retort to 'Atlas'; many people (usually conservatives?) just refer to this as their answer whenever Ayn Rand's name is brought up.

Where is Vega? Is that close to Las Vegans?

I've just finished reading Michael Crichton's 'State of Fear' in which he points out that 50,000,000 (fifty million) people have died as a result of banning DDT (due to the increase in mosquito populations). I wonder if the 'G' word could be applied to this.

Since Rand came from a more Jewish culture I think this quote from the Jewish Library website might be apropos: "Saint Augustine (354-430) was the first theologian to teach that man is born into this world in a state of sin. The basis of his belief is from the Bible (Genesis 3:17-19) where Adam is described as having disobeyed G-d by eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. This, the first sin of man, became known as original sin. Many Christians today, particularly members of the Anglican, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian Churches, subscribe to this belief. They maintain that the sin of Adam was transferred to all future generations, tainting even the unborn. Substantiation for this view is found in the New Testament (Romans 5:12) where Paul says, "Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. By one man's disobediance many were made sinners." Christianity believes that only through the acceptance of Jesus that the "grace" of G-d can return to man. A Christian need only believe in Jesus to be saved; nothing else is required of her. The doctrine of original sin is totally unacceptable to Jews (as it is to Christian sects such as Baptists and Assemblies of G-d). Jews believe that man enters the world free of sin, with a soul that is pure and innocent and untainted. While there were some Jewish teachers in Talmudic times who believed that death was a punishment brought upon mankind on account of Adam's sin, the dominant view by far was that man sins because he is not a perfect being, and not, as Christianity teaches, because he is inherently sinful."

I think Flagg was trying to get feedback as to whether his argument was nice and tight, and of course it is a standard math technique to assume what you wish to disprove to see what kind of contradiction it leads to. Flagg's argument seems fairly tight to me, even though he is introducing two concepts (causality and perception) that are inherently 'outer' related, still he is showing that the idea of generating the whole universe internally is pretty dumb.

The important thing about understanding religion is to understand that whatever is good about it is good by a separate standard. Religion has never been able to generate a systematic ethical system from more basic principles or it wouldn't be a religion; it would be a philosophy. All religious people can say is that something is good because God says it is good, and when it is pointed out that holocausts must be OK since an alleged all-powerful God allowed them to happen, the religious people just ignore things that make them uncomfortable. The mystery of religion is understanding why the most Western religion (Christianity) is also the one most dedicated to 'faith' i.e. arbitrary belief. The west is associated with science and technology, and yet the religion of the west is the one that is most explicitly an appeal to authority and treating facts and arguments as though evidence and arguments were a person that was trying to force you to change your mind.

Hi everyone, back after a 2 week vacation (skiing in Taos- it snowed a blizzard on my second day!), and can't find any comments about our U.S. President firing (or asking to step down) the CEO of GM. I wasn't watching the news when this happened and was wondering if anyone else is bothered by this besides me. The U.S. government is now responsible for the warranties of the U.S. automakers too btw.

Barbara, your post #9 was beautiful, I love it and feel inspired by your words. If I may bring up something that galtgulch said in his reply, the anarchist branch of the libertarian philosophy represented by Rothbard and his followers has never made sense to me. I shudder to think where we would be without a constitution at all right now. They remind me of socialists because they insist that there will be competitive governments if there is no government, and if social reality formed a totalitarian regime if you destroyed the current government, the anarchist would be responsible for what actually happens rather than what they wished or hoped for. Limited government still works, there were just wedges in our constitution that gave the government something to work with and grow into the present day. It ain't over yet.

The saying goes like "you can't step into the same river twice". Your missed the point: To make this more explicit; If you can't step in the river twice you can't step into it once. The concept of the Mississippi river already involves the idea of water flow (1.6 million gallons per second usually) so if you obliterate the concept of 'river' by stating that you can't step into the 'same' river twice you can't step into it at all. The concept of river is a flow of water down a more or less fixed path. If you were any more concrete bound, you'd be at the bottom of the river... First it isn't concrete bound to define your terms...it is concrete bound not to define your terms. Secdondly, how does being concrete bound (if that were so) put me at the bottom of a river? If this is a threat and you continue with threats I'll ask Michael to moderate. Even if I were at the bottom of a river the flow of water would define where I was. A is A and you can't have a flow of water and deny it at the same time in the same sense.

The saying goes like "you can't step into the same river twice". Your missed the point: To make this more explicit; If you can't step in the river twice you can't step into it once. The concept of the Mississippi river already involves the idea of water flow (1.6 million gallons per second usually) so if you obliterate the concept of 'river' by stating that you can't step into the 'same' river twice you can't step into it at all. The concept of river is a flow of water down a more or less fixed path.

It has been pointed out that if you can't step in the river twice you can't step in to it once either.

In Objectivist theory Boolean logic isn't really an investigation of the nature of thinking, 'Aristotilean' logic (real logic) is the most important. Brand Blanshard critiqued modern philosophy and H.W.B. Joseph's books were on the book list of suggested reading.

The best thing I ever read about Ayn Rand comes from Barbara Branden in her book 'The Passion of Ayn Rand'; paraphrasing (my books are in storage), if Ayn Rand had been any different she wouldn't have written 'Atlas Shrugged'. I agree with that whole heartedly and it doesn't stop me from seeing Ayn Rand as rather one-sided in some ways, and seeing her as a person as Barbara showed us in her book, and still seeing the heroism of Ayn Rand. I'm somewhat embarrassed that it took me so long to figure out the allusion to 'the Passion' (as in Bach's 'Passion of St. Matthew'). I've come to see literary heroes as a kind of bullseye on the dart board of life...something to aim at and if you miss...so what? just adjust your aim a little.