Kevin Haggerty

Absolutely, they can both be wrong. And how! But they gotta be wrong about what they're wrong about, don't they? I don't see intellectual dishonesty in using your friend's tactics in a war of words, particularly when it's your friend's idea to use 'em in the first place. In these parts, calling a man "intellectually dishonest" is about as black a mark against his character you can find and it makes me a little bit crazy how ready some people are to go there. I do see Hillary trying to bring Barrak down as a person and I think it's a bad move--she goes for the ad hominem like a pigeon goes for bread crumbs. But Hillary's got no game, while Obam' the Phenom' is walking away with the nomination at this rate. I just calls 'em likes I sees 'em! (It's good to see you, Michael, how's the book coming?) Kevin

Y'know, you might have a point here if it was a whole speech. If he copied a speech. But it's not and he didn't. It's a blurb, it's a sound-bite. It's a 30 second quip. What it really is is a come-back. Hilary says he's "all words" and this is his retorts. All his friend had to say was, "All words, eh? Just bring up all the great words of America's great orators, like 'I have a dream' and 'we hold these truths to be self-evident,' etc." It's a list is all. The reason his "speech" is a copy of Patrick's "speech" is because they both list the same chestnuts of American rhetoric. Not if you look at the primary and caucus results! I think his detractors have a problem with it, a serious problem. And while we're at it, I'm not sure what strawman Michael was referring to, actually. Obama didn't dodge her attack, he engulfed it. Clinton makes a pretty broad swipe, pretty general--certainly no specifics on her part--and he dismisses it with a flourish. The same flourish his friend used two years ago. If you're looking for intellectual dishonesty look no further than Ms. Clinton. She knows perfectly well Obama has positions, they've debated umpteen million times on 'em. He's got his li'l 5 year plan, just like she does. She's attacking his style. Isn't this obvious? She, who, let's face it, is not much of an orator, is attacking him for being a pretty damn good one. And he threw it back in her face. I get from the tone of your post that you don't like Obama to begin with. Me, I appreciate good oratory from a political candidate for once in my life. Do you, honestly, give a crap about this particular Clinton/Obama spat? Do you honestly believe that Obama cribbing a retort from a friend of his in part of a speech will have any major bearing on his ability to perform the duties of President of the United States? Kevin

Dustan, it was Patrick's idea for Obama to use his tactic in the first place, Patrick thought it would be a good way to respond to Hilary. So there is no "vs." here. Intellectually dishonest... It's just people looking for dirt where there is none. Kevin

Omygod, she was an Aquarius??? That explains EVERYTHING! :sorcerer:

Ah well, shoulda kept lurking. What excuses can I muster? It was late? The lights from the oncoming cars blinded me? I was posessed by demons? No. I fail. Carry on. Good to see you about, Jonathan.

Hey everybody, sorry for coming so late to the party, but having not finished AS, I tend to skip threads on the topic (naturally enough). Add to this that I've only read the first 6 pages of this thread and then this last, and perhaps I should really continue lurking, BUUUUUUUUUUUUUT (takes a breath) I have a defense of Dagny that no one seems to have offered as of yet. The crucial issue here, as always, is context. Without context, yes, she killed a guard because he couldn't make up his mind. Shock! Outrage! Bob isolates the sentence which denotes this and then jumps to whatever conclusion suits him, because without the specific context of WHAT the man couldn't make up his mind ABOUT, that's exactly what Bob gets to do. He drops the context and supplies his own. Wheeeee! Commando ops! Piano wire! But if we simply include the context: the guard couldn't make up his mind...1...2...3...ABOUT JOHN GALT, then the scene makes the simplest kind of sense. The premise the book rests on is that John Galt is right, righter perhaps than anyone who has ever lived. You don't knowingly interfere with that. If you do, then definitively, you are evil. And if you knowingly vacillate about it, well, the end result is the same, you're sanctioning evil by your inaction; you're stalling because for you, MAYBE evil is right. This guy could not recognize what side he was on and that placed him on the wrong side--he could not recognize the good. Oh, poor guy, he was just confused! But what AR is saying is that you can't be innocently confused about the good when it's right in front of you. "Okay, so you're confused," says Dagny, "Well, I'm not. Get out of my way!" And he doesn't. Well, in terms of reality, his inaction speaks louder than words. What his behavior told her was that he was a willing pawn of evil. Too bad for him. To Dagny, John Galt is the good, he is the right. And the narrator agrees with her. So Galt is kind of a litmus test--if you side against him, if you vacillate in doing what you can to aid him when put to the test--you are part of the problem and in a romantically realistic novel, you will come to a bad end. No? -Kevin

Ach! No child is being saved from cancer by this. No child is being saved from HIV by this. There is no earthly reason to circumcise a child. If you elect to be circumcised upon reaching your majority, no one will stop you. Please, Bob, in this, at least, desist. -Kevin

Yes, Michael, scalping was first used as a way to determine payment to mercenaries sent by the British Crown into Ireland to kill Irishmen--more scalps, more proof of murder, more payment. When the Crown was done with that campaign, they sent the same mercenaries to America to kill Indians. The Native American "military" was so astounded and so impressed with the savagery of scalping they felt that they must "escalate" their practices to match it. Culturally, yes, scalping had a strange connection to the difficult to translate concept of "counting coup"--a practice derived from the ritual shaming of an enemy by touching or hitting your enemy on the head. The concept expanded and changed over time and across native cultures to include stealing an enemy camp's horses, for instance, and eventually included this practice of scalping. -Kevin

Hey Robert, I'm no Peikoff scholar by a long shot, but from what I have read, it strikes me that in his writing revilement tends to trump philosophical consistency. So often, he seems simply to be going for the put-down: "It's evil!" becomes "It's meaningless!" becomes "It's stupid!" depending on what aspect strikes him as being the most damning in the moment. The black and white world he inhabits (and no, I don't see a world that is all greys, but a world in full color, thank you very much ;) ) disallows him making distinctions between degrees and kinds of wrong. Wrong is all wrong, largely indifferentiable from any other wrong. How else can he list "Nazism, Communism, non-objective art (lol), non-Aristotelian logic, egalitarianism, nihilism, the pragmatist cult of compromise, the Shirley MacLaine types, who 'channel' with ghosts and recount their previous lives" as moral equivalents? Why didn't he include "libertarianism, adultery, taking more than one's fair share of donuts at breakfast and falling asleep in philosophy class?" I'm reminded of a documentary on the Catholic Church's attitude toward pedophilia in the priesthood, Deliver Us From Evil. A therapist comments that since the Catholic hierarchy demands complete celibacy of its priests and therefore accounts any sexual act a mortal sin, they make no distinction between sleeping with a parishioner's wife and raping his 9 year old daughter. Sex is sex. Evil is evil. At the risk of "psychologizing," Peikoff's attitude strikes me as fundamentally naïve. Whenever folks go on and on as he does in Fact and Value about "evil," I gotta wonder what kinds of evil they've actually had to deal with in their lives. The evil of murder, the evil of pedophilia (I've had the misfortune of personally dealing with both actualities in my lifetime) are, up close, not subjects for philosophical chit-chat. They are harrowing mysteries of human volition demanding the steadiest, most painstaking analysis and inquiry. To confuse this kind of absolute human failure with anything merely discussed in a lecture hall would excite my gravest contempt were it not so completely silly. (I hasten to add, even those of us who have dealt with significant evil in reality, because of evil's nature, are often undone by it and come away with the most warped and corrupt notions. Without help, we generally get worse, not better, after an encounter with real evil.) My experience has taught me that most people are simply confused because their encounter with reality is impoverished--their range of experience is too narrow, too comfortable to demand thinking through the really hard stuff. Furthermore, the really hard stuff is definitively overwhelming and disturbing, so they're more than willing to take this or that authority's word on the subject in the hopes that the real deal never touches them directly. Whatever method we find to encourage others of our species to think for themselves, to encounter reality fully and unflinchingly--no matter what evil, reality-contradicting gobbledygook they may have cluttering up their minds--is, to my mind, a very good thing indeed; be it lecturing to libertarians, or posting on the Internet. -Kevin

There have been many great tenors, men with beautiful voices, but Pavarotti--man! He was something unto himself! I can listen to Nessun Dorma a thousand times (and have--and will a thousand more) and every time his voice catches me by surprise! His was a dream of a voice, something seemingly impossible and yet so real. I feel lucky to have lived in his time. -Kevin

Hi Paul, I know the thread is over a year old now, so I'm not surprised if the stuff I referenced doesn't seem to be part of this thread, but that's where I got it. In addition to the quote of yours that I posted, your Nathaniel Branden quotes are from post #22 as well, and Dragonfly seemed to be arguing that "free will" was the modern equivalent of a cargo cult pretty much the whole time he was posting here (you and he had obviously been working the topic over in other threads, but I don't believe I've read those). To state my position more starkly, I don't see how determinism is at all compatible with a notion of "self esteem." In psychology, the deterministic world view is pretty indivisible from depression and a belief in the self as victim. Don't know how one can consider one's self a true "actor on the world stage" if everything one does is the result of forces external to the self. And as I said, mere functionality ("Yay, the machine isn't broken!") doesn't strike me as much to esteem. And Bob, I don't think a lot of people who value intuition as a concept would equate it with "common sense." Perhaps you get your definition from phrases like "intuitively obvious." I doubt that's the "intuition" Paul is talking about. What I would call "intuition" seems, often as not, to be completely at odds with "common sense." You know, the world is constantly supplying our minds with far more information than we can consciously process. We have basic (largely subconscious) filters that decide what is to be foregrounded in the conscious mind and what's to be backgrounded to the subconscious mind (if we didn't we'd all be autistic). Even though so much of our experience goes right past our conscious awareness, our minds seem to be able to process and double check this info for meaning. That's where the intuition comes in, when our minds draw conclusions from the welter of unconscious information we gather every minute of the day. That's how Kekule was able to come up with the benzene ring. And that's where someone like Paul may get his intuition that determinism is not the final word on causality. -Kevin

Wow, I missed this discussion completely! And now some of my off-line reading has gotten me thinking about will in some new ways and with Bob's posting yesterday, the title of this old thread announced itself to me from the "today's active topics" page and I started reading it, etc. (Michael, isn't it wonderful how broad and deep the world of O-L has become? How hard it is, I presume, for most of us to keep abreast of all the many fascinating developments? Quite an accomplishment! Thoroughly redundant congratulations to you and Kat!) It's funny, me visiting this site and finding it of value, because, for the most part, I have no patience for philosophy. The constantly reductive discussions of philosophers bore me close to tears and rarely if ever express anything I'd want to take home with me. What does fascinate me is psychology. I am particularly interested in the place where psychology and philosophy meet. Not so much "what" people are thinking, but "why." It's curious to me that Paul's NB quotes here have gotten exactly zero commentary, because they seem to me to be at the beating heart of whatever the heck we're talking about when we talk about "free will." Keeping it simple and letting reality be my guide, self-esteem seems to be the elephant in this room. Forget about where free will comes from, I want to know where self-esteem comes from! In a deterministic universe, self-esteem must be pure delusion, sentimental attachment to an abstraction. Either that, or some bloodless equivalent to "Yay! The machine isn't broken!" Why would you congratulate or esteem something for simply working properly? I mean, how much excitement, how much passion can a mere mechanism generate? To quote Paul's post #22: "Without human will, thinking is automatic, art is automatic, love is automatic, existence is automatic, passion is dead!" If indeed we have a self to be esteemed, then the self must generate something to account for it. If passion is a value, it cannot simply be a measure of a machine's struggle against brokenness. On the other hand, Dragonfly's argument has an elegance to it. Just as ancient people thought the gods must be responsible for the natural phenomena they could not understand, so modern man deifies his own poorly understood motives with the magnificent notion that he is the unmoved mover of his own will. I suppose, then, self-esteem would, at best, be relegated to the level of a "necessary fiction." Seems obvious to me that if self-esteem is a real value, then free will must be a real phenomenon. In psychotherapy we are confronted again and again by the praxis of free will, in contraversion to a life-time's worth of causation and addictions, coming forward out of the mysterious individual human being to say, "No, I am not simply the result of the many forces in my life. Today, this moment, I choose to unwrite the program and begin anew." No respectable therapist would ever claim agency for such a patient's shift. It's something in the individual, something unprecedented and transformative. Put even more simply, I'm talking about creativity itself. Is creativity an illusion? Can a Dragonfly honestly say that the creation of great art that transforms consciousness and propels the race toward greater and greater levels of awareness is just an inevitable result of Newtonian principles? And if he can, then--and I mean this very seriously--why do we care about any of it? -Kevin

Steve, I got two words for you: Ayn Rand. Born in Tsarist Russia. And--and--she had no children. And yet. Not "not particularly rational," but exceptionally rational. And, a heck of a legacy, wouldn't you say? Even "heirs." This kind of trendy trend-mongering you're talking about becomes more and more fictive the further into the future you project it. Human beings are not fruit flies. And rationality is--get this--a natural reaction to reality itself. It cannot die out any more than the human desire for beauty or our lamentable fear of the unknown. And as demonstrated by Ms. Rand, it can crop up just about anywhere. Who's to say the next Ayn Rand won't be born in Tehran? Not you, and not "demographics." Rationality dying out? Because white people are having fewer babies than brown people? Or because your and my own wondrous rational genes might die without any heirs? C'mon, Steve! Beyond all that, rationality has greater influence in the entire world today than at any other time in human history. Prove me wrong. The rate of information exchange, the velocity of technological advancements year after year, the success of capitalism in far flung corners of the world--what about these trends? From where I sit, the "irrational world" is not on the brink of swallowing us up at all. On the contrary, the forces of unreason in the world are feeling extremely threatened, and rightly so! And what does a frightened, cornered animal do? It puffs itself up as big as it can and lashes out (hello? Terrorism? Suicide bombers? Fatwas on novelists?). Fundamentalist Islam is not a meaningful ideology on the rise, it is an ancient rageful order on the brink of its own obsolescence. Prove me wrong. I ain't saying they can't do a whole lot of damage in the meantime, but the writing is on the wall. Look where Soviet Russia was a generation ago and look at it today. Reason even brought the Catholic Church to heel, now it's Islam's turn. That is one HUGE assumption, Steve. Three words: human developmental psychology. You beg a few questions with this: Are you, yourself, the product of such a rationalist dynasty? Can you point to ANY such family line in any culture at any time in human history? You know, seriously, in light of all you've said on the topic here, I kinda feel a little sorry for any children you might bring into the world, seeing the heavy-handed agenda you have in store for the poor kids. Anyone who makes the world a better place has given future generations something precious for which the most rational response is simply gratitude. Our gratitude to previous generations does not imply any obligation on their part, nor on ours. It is natural, however, that someone with a thriving self esteem would want to be the type of person future generations look back on with gratitude, just as we draw inspiration from the giants upon whose shoulders we stand. Furthermore, a great many of the greatest artists and thinkers, the greatest achievers in history have left the world childless. Individuals have different strengths and contribute to the world in different ways. C'mon, speaking for yourself, would you rather have Atlas Shrugged or Frank O'Connor Jr.? -Kevin

Hey Dustan, Thank you for your very civil reply. Here's what I got for ya: first of all, there is no promise or contract implicit in pregnancy. A girl of 14 can become pregnant, but what contract can she reasonably be held liable for? In fact, one can become pregnant with absolutely no knowledge of how conception is achieved. Also, pregnancy is not a definite outcome of sexual intercourse in any case, only a possibility. Even pregnancies reabsorb and miscarry on their own, not infrequently. So pregnancy is never a simple matter of choice. So we are gonna force a woman to accept full responsibility for an outcome that might or might not happen? Her bad luck being the cause of lifelong moral responsibility? Okay, and I see no need to suppose that a fetus "initiates force" on anyone--remember, my contention is that the fetus does not constitute an individual--separate it from the mother and it will cease to be. And, no, I will never accept that the mere act of penetration is an initiation of force! Yikes! And the difference between a woman inducing a miscarriage and a mother abandoning a child, is that the child is an individual, one that another person could care for and raise, for instance. Nobody can take over the pregnancy of a 2 month pregnant woman who wishes to opt out. There is no option for her but either to have the baby or abort the fetus. I hear you say "adoption, etc." but adoption does not solve the problems of a 2 month pregnant woman who no longer wants to be pregnant; a woman who's life is already being disrupted mightily, who's viability as a wage earner, for instance, may very well be at stake. Would you force such a woman to continue to carry an unwanted fetus...how much of such force is okay with you? A week? A month? Six? I'm good with determining viability in the most obvious way--what's medically possible? As medical science advances, as younger and younger fetuses become viable, great! Viability is viability. Seems pretty simple to me. Why do folks find this stuff so mysterious? And good gravy, who's "grinding up" babies? What's with the pro-life horror jargon? You and I are not arguing about late stage abortions here. Most cultures throughout history have recognized that a baby exists upon "quickening"--not a bad start in my view. Again, seems pretty straight forward. Sure, a D & C is "aggressive," but you can say that of any surgical procedure. Initiation of force is not a categorical problem. A tonsillectomy is an initiation of force against the innocent tonsil and building a house is an initiation of force against the lot where it's built. Initiation of force is only a problem when it infringes upon the rights of one or more individual human beings--individual. No individual? No actionable force. And finally, as to your problem with folks saying no to Dr. Paul's candidacy based on his stance on abortion, I can only speak for myself. His stance on abortion is a huge disappointment to me, because I find his view (to coin a phrase) mystical. I find his reasoning marred--even ruled--by an emotional reaction. The same reasoning could drive a man to seek to outlaw red meat after visiting a meat processing plant. And for the guy to condemn all abortion because he witnessed a late stage procedure that prolly shouldn't be legal anyway looks like an hysterical overreaction. And finally, if he really thinks a fetus has individual rights at the moment of conception, he ain't being rational at all. That said, were he to get the nomination, I'd prolly end up voting for the man, because his personal shortcomings in this arena--which I don't take at all lightly--would have little weight in legal terms and his positions on other matters would recommend him ahead of pretty much everyone else in the field. -Kevin

But Dustan, If a life is wholly dependent on another life for existence itself--I mean wholly and literally--do they truly have a separate, individual existence? Shouldn't a person have the right to say "no" to such an arrangement? Pull the plug, so to speak? The situation puts the mother in a position not so much to murder the fetus as to withhold her body from it--a strange form of murder, to say the least. Bringing a baby to term is also a risk and a personal sacrifice. What you're arguing seems to be a moral obligation of a pregnant woman to sacrifice a portion of her life for another individual. I disagree that the only reasonable debate is whether the fetus is "life" or not. If that were the debate, the pro-life folk would simply win (which is why such folk always frame the debate in such terms). The issue is not whether the fetus is alive or not (of course it is), nor even whether it is "human" or not (of course it is), but whether or not it is an individual (which it clearly is not for quite some time). Sure, if the fetus is viable, the mother is killing an individual and has infringed upon that individual's rights. But before the fetus is viable, I would argue, it is not an individual life separate from it's mother's and so lacks individual rights. -Kevin

I'd say anything by Brad Bird: The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille. All of them celebrate reason and the individual and deal with the trouble exceptional people get into. The ending of Ratatouille is particularly wonderful from a romantically realistic point of view. -Kevin

Hey Michael, I can't (and would never try to) speak for Wolf, of course, but I wanted to speak to this myself. First of all, have you had the chance to read Reading Lolita in Tehran? It's a very powerful and insightful memoir by an Iranian woman college professor of literature, mostly covering the years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Iran/Iraq war. The reason I ask is because there's an important and deeply disturbing debate held in her classroom between progressive western values and Islamic fundamentalism. In the debate, the student speaking for western values absolutely talks circles around the reactionary student, making the reactionary student's argument seem ridiculous at every turn--repetitive, absurd, morbid, without merit or credibility. Within a few short weeks of this debate, the revolution happens and all the absurd mumbo-jumbo of the fundamentalist student's argument is suddenly the Law of the Land. It's profoundly chilling to read and I cannot recommend it highly enough at this moment in history. So, Bob's relative persuasiveness is really neither here nor there to my mind. Bob's point of view is, full stop. And his is not an isolated case, from where I sit. Sure we heard more of this kind of "glass parking lot" style rhetoric when the war in Iraq began, but what amazes and disturbs me immensely is that it hasn't disappeared. It's there, in Bob and in a whole lot of folks as strong and hateful as ever. Bob's not a stupid man, he's not an uneducated man, nor even an uninformed or incurious man. Orwell's idea of a permanent war is made possible when enough people have accepted permanent hate. For such folks it is a race of people or an entire ideology that must be wiped from the earth before their hatred will come to an end. But the hate, the bigotry--it comes from inside. Most of us try to deal with our hate directly as a personal problem to lessen the toll it takes on our lives and the lives of those we love. But some folks cling to their hate, nurture it and enshrine it. You know, we see what this kind of hatred can do in other parts of the world--Rwanda, Chechnya, etc. What I want to know is how someone who thinks this way now in our country thought before 9/11. I get the feeling that most of the genocidal "bomb Mecca" types were relatively normal, peaceful people before. Then 9/11 happens and they find they have a bottomless capacity for hate and rage that just doesn't go away, but instead becomes the central premise of their "post-9/11" world view. I don't know. I can't be sure, because folks like Bob don't really share the process by which they develop their ideas, they present their ideas as self-evident. They give examples of their hated enemy's acts and tactics, but they don't personally account for the hate. What I've been able to gather from such folks is that for them hating Islam is not a choice, it is a definition. -Kevin

Ed, Is it at all relevent that Ellison was comparing the uses to which Hilter put the Reichstag burning, to the uses our present administration put 9/11? Surely, the comparison to Hitler is inflamatory, but the headline "Bush like Hitler, says first Muslim in Congress" is every bit as inflamatory if you try to bury the specific context of the comparison. Is there another Leader in recent history who used a terrorist attack to justify a war of aggression to whom Bush could more sensibly be compared? It seems to me that the Bush administration's own questionable actions have invited such unsavory comparisons, whether or not history proves such comparisons justified in the end. And complaining that because Ellison is Muslim he should be applauding a Hitler-like President, facetious as you may be, nonetheless supports the stereotype that all Muslims, at all times in history, think exactly alike and get their marching orders from "Muslim High Command." Yeah, and JFK got his orders from the Pope. Seems to me, from what you've posted, Ellison's loyalties are ethnic rather than religious and that what he's saying wouldn't even show up on your radar if he weren't a Muslim. All kinds of non-Muslims have compared Bush to Hitler, with far less context than Ellison here supplies. -Kevin

I always thought it was basically a jurisdictional issue with abortion. What goes on within the borders of your own body is up to you. Seems to me that once the fetus is viable without the mother's womb to protect and nurture it, then you might make the argument that it exists as a being with emigration rights, so to speak. But as long as it is totally dependent on its mother for life, it is a part of her, definitively. It is a peculiarity of biological fate that women should have the power to destroy in this way, but they do and we men should be able to live with that, IMO. I keep imagining a science fictional situation where a patient was put on life support and that life support was actually another person's body. That the person whose own body was providing life support would have no option to pull the plug seems to amount to slavery, so to my mind, Bob's brood-mare is not too far off the mark. What I heard from Dr. Paul on the subject, a sound bite about witnessing with horror a very late stage abortion and deciding that it was "wrong, just wrong" sounded to me like a simple case of pandering to the Republican base. He seems to be foregrounding his personal disgust because it's what they want to hear, since he knows full well that his personal feelings have absolutely no bearing on law. I predict that his book will be very much against such late stage abortions, as most folks would be, but completely accepting of abortion when the fetus is still in the "squiggle" stages. -Kevin

Thanks for your prompt reply, Bob, but it fails by a large margin to win me over to your view. "How about twenty nukes or radiological dirty bombs in twenty cities, plus poisoning municipal water supplies, sabotaging power lines, oil pipelines and blowing up bridges and tunnels. All doable by low-tech means." Pardon my ignorance, but when has such a campaign ever been waged by a conquering army? And 20 nukes? The USSR had hundreds. It don't add up. I'm sure there are ways of doing it, and I know there is the will out there, but you have yet to demonstrate that they have the means to pull it off. "We live in a very technological society. That is good news and it is bad news. The good news is that it makes us very comfortable, prosperous, wealthy and healthy. The bad news is that it can be brought to ruin be relatively simple means (see above)." Americans are nothing if not resourceful and adaptable. And, when the shit hits the fan, we'll have friends around the world. "Which is why I advocate eliminating them before they bring ruination upon us." I still see no reason to believe this is a remote possibility. There is absolutely no precedent, that I know of, for the kind of ruination you imagine. What makes you think such a mountain can be scaled by the Islamists? "They can inflict the Death of a Thousand Cuts on us." Only if we lie very still and let them--which ain't gonna happen, no matter what. Show me a Nation that has been brought down in this fashion. "If he comes to kill you, rise up early and slay him first --- Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 72a." Sure, if he comes. Until then, what you advocate amounts to imperialism. America has always had enemies that wished her downfall (as has every Nation on earth, for that matter), not an excuse to start destroying whole countries full of people. History has shown us: that kind of madness pre-empts nothing but peace. Kevin

Bob, How do you figure? What resources do the Radical Islamists have that could defeat our army on our soil and defeat our spirit as a people? The American Dream is alive and well across the globe, our present Administration notwithstanding. What makes you think we are so weak that within a generation we could all be Muslim? Back in the day, folks talked about "Comintern" and "domino theory" and the "red plague" and it's all come to nothing, nothing, nothing--and the power of the former USSR makes these rag-tag criminal Islamists look like, well, rag-tag criminals. One nuke in a major city, as horrific as that would be, would not and could not end our way of life, and that's surely as far as any of their plans would get before the innevitable swift and devastating reprisal. What makes a man like you so frightened of these people? I mean no disrespect. I just can't get my head around all this terror of Islam. Kevin

I don't mean to hijack the thread, but I really gotta ask: what happened to our American self-esteem? Here we are, one of the richest countries the world has ever seen, perhaps the most influential and positively influential country/culture the world has ever known, with an extraordinarily enviable geographical situation with respect to any "enemy" you can name--how is it that one admittedly unprecedented and tragically destructive terror attack has been so wildly successful (that is, frightened us so profoundly) that we now believe we must fight all-out war to keep from being utterly destroyed? 9/11 was devastating, but unless it was an inside job with folks in the Administration and NORAD and wot not in on it, it was also one of the luckiest damn flukes ever to darken the door of world politics. So many different instances of incompetence and confusion and sheer coincidence had to come together that morning to make it possible. Now, I am seriously not advocating conspiracy here, just pointing out that the likelihood of anything happening even of 9/11 magnitude anytime soon is next to nil. The barn door is shut; the next time a President gets a memo of the "Osama Bin Laden is planning a terror attack in New York involving planes" sort, he (or she) is gonna take notice. Even if some terrorist gets ahold of a nuclear weapon as seems inevitable (eventually) how does one bomb translate into the destruction of America? Surely, the day any enemy is so unutterably foolish as to set off a nuclear explosion in any American city, he must know that whatever corner of the world he chooses to hide will in due time be vaporized by our reprisal. But here's a thing, while we wring our hands over the possibility of a terrorist getting a bomb some day, history has shown that even a whole country with a full-time military as powerful as that of the old Soviet Union and warheads aplenty, could not/did not, as they expressly hoped to do, "bury us." Quite the contrary. And even though many countries on the planet have nuclear capability, not one has ever used one on an enemy, you know, except us. What are we so afraid of? So why should we, as a nation, fear the terrorists? Why should we, as a nation, fear that the dreams of radical Islamic crazies will come true? What do these extremists have that Russia and China did not? Why have we let one lucky act of barbarity shake us so to the core? Yes, radical Islam is a problem. Yes, we should keep an eye on them and twart their pathetic self-destructive schemes whenever and where ever they be found, but that's about it. I'm sorry, maybe I'm an idiot, maybe I've been brainwashed by some "liberal media" or something, but this has been bothering me for a good seven years and I have yet to find a satisfactory answer anywhere. --Kevin

I'm sorry, Barbara, I think I stated my case a bit too strongly, and it came across too one dimentionally. Clarification lies in the concept of "fusion" as I understand it. The fused identity is definitively inauthentic, it is a role, a safe façade behind which the child hides. In fusing her identity with the abusive parent, the child experiences a split within her own psyche. So the child accepts the parent's actions as appropriate, and does not accept; the authentic self is merely eclipsed, not destroyed or absent. My own childhood was actually pretty violent and I can remember from a very early age thinking with steely conviction, "I'm going to get out of this." I remember taking great comfort in that conviction which I understand to be the voice of my true self, my self-esteem.

Hey Barbara, Thanks for injecting some much needed simplicity and sanity into the hysteria surrounding Alec Baldwin's recent verbal abuse of his daughter (I have to say the fact that he couldn't be sure if she was 11 or 12 was particularly damning). From where I sit, I don't so much see the forgiving of Alec Baldwin being a liberal issue as much as it reflects a culture of abused children and abusive parents protecting the status quo. I read many people who were abused similarly by their parents, claiming that it's "no big deal." These folks are simply protecting their idealized image of the parent. In psychotherapeutic circles this is called "fusing with the abuser." When a parent abuses his child, the child must fuse with that parent as a matter of survival--whatever abuse he chooses to heap upon the child, the young child is bound to accept as right and appropriate. As the child matures, she has the opportunity to discover that her parent was wrong. Many, many folks never come to that realization. Having desensitized themselves to the abuse as children, they've grown up desensitized to it and repeat the old programming they got as children--the child probably deserved it, we don't know what the father was going through, etc. Such folks really are regurgitating what they learned in kindergarten! Robert Fulghum would be proud! Also, I've found that many people believe that how a parent chooses to treat his child is absolutely no one else's business. This is also reflective a culture that protects the parent's prerogative to abuse his child. We've all witnessed parents abusing their children in public. When I've spoken up and objected, the parent invariably has instructed me to "mind my own business," sometimes with other adults present in vocal agreement. Again, whole generations of people defend the abuse they suffered at the hands of the previous generation, rather than go through the pain and grief of individuation. That said, I will agree with you that the politically liberal stance in America is often a very disempowered stance--no more so than in recent years; a weak, know-nothing defense of the status quo; a disempowered, anti-individual (anti-self-esteem) sentiment which such folk indeed learned in childhood and perpetuate in their adult lives. -Kevin

I've been thinking about Mr. Sayet's talk for a while now and the more I've thought about it, the more disturbed I have become. I have to thank Objectivism for turning me onto the idea that "context" is the defining arena of reason--that without understanding our context there can be neither ethics, nor reality, nor judgment, nor reason--only illusion and whimsy. What we perceive as our context describes the limits of our ability to reason. The broader our context, therefore, the more rational our thinking will be. The greatest problem I see facing those of us who love reason is the apparent inability and profound disinclination of most people (all of us, at one time or another) to perceive--or at the very least grant--the difference in context which leads our intellectual and ideological enemies to speak and act as they do. After all, if we are rational beings, our most strongly held beliefs will be the ones founded on the soundest reasoning available within our context--to even try to think like our enemies literally "goes against everything we believe." Put another way, unable to see the logical thread underlying the beliefs of people with whom we most strongly disagree, we tend to ascribe utterly unconscious, tribal, unmediated emotionalism to their thinking. In psychological terms we project all our disowned and denied irrationality onto our enemies. But such formulations proceed from a faulty premise: that rational men will always agree. Which in turn proceeds from the equally faulty premise: there is only one right answer to any question. The reason this premise is faulty is because rational questioning always takes place within a given context and that context will determine the right answer to the given question. The obvious example: Is killing another human being wrong? Well, it depends on the context. *Sigh* The idea of figuring out "how Modern Liberals think" as Sayet attempts to do reminds me of nothing so much as Freud's infamous conundrum: "What do women want?" Women, that aggregate thing-a-ma-jig that we men will never fathom, but must find a way to control. Liberals, that uncouth mass of infantile frauds that we must--oh, I don't know--defeat? Debunk? Destroy? If I want to know what women want, for instance, mightn't I start by asking a few? Mightn't I start by looking inward at my own natural psychological and biological femininity and seeing what it is I want? How can we imagine that we understand another human being without trying to bridge the gap that separates our thinking, rather than widening it by ascribing untenable illogic to their entire world view? Sayet, like all happy tribalists, sees only reason in himself and his "us," and only emotionalism in his "them." He looks at the film Brokeback Mountain and takes away this message: "Heterosexual marriage isn't that important, go be a homosexual if you choose." How did he do that? By dropping the context which forms the beliefs and emotions of the individuals depicted in the film--the context which makes their emotional reactions logical and individual--and seeing only the strong emotions which in his own personal context--that of a presumably contented heterosexual man--seem alien and hostile. For the two main characters in the movie heterosexuality isn't just unimportant--in fact it's a lie, a prison, an injustice they perpetrate upon themselves--but that's because they're gay. Their individual gayness is the context which Sayet drops to paint the film as "anti-heterosexual" and "anti-marriage." He sees an emotional proposition like "behaving as a heterosexual is cruel and dishonest," which the film very powerfully and movingly depicts, and blanks out the context "...if you're gay." Sayet has afforded me an important insight here, because this kind of thing has always baffled me in the past. One of my favorite films, Thelma & Louise was widely criticized in its day as "man hating." How could anyone think such a thing, I wondered, what with the extraordinarily sympathetic performance by Harvey Keitel in that picture, or even Michael Madson's very decent and devoted boyfriend to Louise? And Sayet supplies the answer: if we ignore the main characters' individual circumstances, the context from which they derive their anger and frustration, and look only at the raw emotionalism, untethered to any context other than the putative affluence and comfort of our own lives, then the movie is simply one anti-male emotion after another. Unable or unwilling to see the world Thelma or Louise see, all the film's detractors saw was the anger and desire for vengeance in the hearts of these two characters. Or take a film that many liberals I have known hated: Forest Gump. Many folks saw the film as somehow "right wing" simply because the main character's individual experiences of Vietnam did not reflect their own most cherished beliefs about that war. And so it is with the "Modern Liberals" for folks like Sayet. He sees their raw emotion vividly, lots of anger and hate and disgust, but can't or won't bring himself to look at what it's all about from their point of view. Which is not to say that "Modern Liberals" always make sense--like the rest of us, Modern Liberals are sometimes subject to low self-esteem and fully capable of scapegoating and denial. Low self-esteem, scapegoating and denial are the problem here, folks, not political philosophy. As it happens, I was at a gathering of Modern Liberals the other night--a planning meeting for the Fremont Solstice Parade and Pageant here in Seattle. They were tossing around "themes" and "global warming" was the big favorite. But nobody had any science to share or any statistics, no one wanted to educate or enlighten anyone, it was all simply in service to the self-loathing victim's mantra that knows no political or geographical limits: EVERYTHING SUCKS AND IT'S ALL THEIR FAULT! And now I've listened to Sayet's talk about the "leftist indoctrination centers" and guess what: EVERYTHING SUCKS AND IT'S ALL THEIR FAULT! Here's a thing: people hate other people because they feel threatened or endangered by those people. Sometimes the other people's existence is itself perceived as a threat. You know, if you want to live in a world where heterosexuality is "good" and homosexuality is "bad" then the existence of happy healthy homosexuals is a "threat." To any tribalist, who naturally ascribes to the notion that his tribe is the "rational" and "good" tribe, any suggestion that other tribes are also "rational" and "good" undermines his "rightness." Aha! See: it's not really about being right, for a tribalist, it's about being superior, because all tribalists suffer from low self-esteem. Tribalism is the enemy of self-esteem--whatever self-worth the tribalist enjoys is granted him by the righteousness of his tribe. And therefore, any attack upon his tribe, undermines his own self-worth. Someone, please, tell me: how is it possible to posit a political "they" without ourselves becoming tribalists? How can we maintain our individuality while condemning vast and varied populations of our fellow individual minds as "them?" If we cannot see the individual "Muslim" or "communist" or "feminist" how are we to keep in mind the individual "American" or "Objectivist?" --Kevin