Neil Parille

Valliant also claims (around 14 mins) that Rand quite smoking because she became convinced that the science indicated it was dangerous. Of course she quite smoking because her physician showed her an x-ray of her lungs inidcating that she likely had cancer, She put her cigarette out and never smoked again. This account is not only in Barbara's bio but in 100 Voices (which has an interview with Dr. Dwortezky). Valliant is lying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEcJXomQ4eU According to James, he and Rothbard were "good friends." This seems to be the first he's ever said that.

Michael, I listened to it because I was curious how the dynamic duo would explain why disagreeing with Rand (if they did) was not a version of "open Objectivism." Here is my takeaway: 1. Valliant pretty much admits he's bisexual. Binswanger is mildly critical of homosexuality and says its hard to integrate with Rand's views of masculinity and femininity. 2. They both imply that Rand's comments on homosexuality were limited to her Q and A. I don't think that's true. They mention Branden's early views of the psychology of homosexuality but don't say he presented his theory in The Objectivist, which Rand approved of. 3. Binswanger says he discussed the topic with Rand and she "walked back" her harsh criticism of homosexuality. I don't trust Binswanger, but who knows. 4. They had almost a complete separation between psychology and philosophy which seems un-Objectivist to me. However, I haven't read the relevant essays in a long time. 5. When the moderator introduced Valliant, he didn't mention that he was the author of PARC. There was no mention of the book, the diaries published in it, or the Rand/Branden affair (which might have been relevant to the viability of a person being bisexual). I recall that the gossip was Binswanger didn't like the fact that Valliant published the diaries. I can't imagine that he's a fan of the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfPoEtRJ5UA&fbclid=IwAR2j-lQNihJYISdsuvFtgRgNk6dvc1fA2PO0VSEBqZQJKQsp-R-Y-AsfWFQ

Dr. Jill Biden's craptastic EDD thesis is even worse. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20407226/bidens-dissertation.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1zqZTUE6hyU7KkvfFU6qt2c7osyWMc9gihlCuJ99nwbc9HHLcW7erUkgA

She says she got access to the ARI's archives after her biography and it didn't change much of anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCSoc7ZP9r8&fbclid=IwAR3-ivhxuW2btK3sG87YRUPQ8e1mvvhdq-QFOIudz-Y65_5v0-XZrfIdHo0

Good article.

"A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Jill Biden, his wife." Brant, that's "Dr. Jill Biden" to you. You've got to give proper honor to a woman wrote a 55 page thesis about how to keep students in community college.

It's a wonder that Peikoff or whoever thought that Brook should be the spokesman for the ARI. He is such a smug, condescending, abrasive and just unlikeable person. Maybe he is or was good at raising money.

Yeah, I should have said "ex-Scientologist." I just wonder: how bad can things be in Peikoff's mind concerning the ARI to do this at his old age?

I wonder if Peikoff knows how leftist Biddle is and that Barney is a scientologist. He's up there in years and doesn't look like he's in good health.

The new group doesn't have any big names in philosophy yet. And Biddle never seemed all that interested in that. His "journal" consists mostly of feel-good pieces.

Michael, I think Amy's kind of cute, but as a "sexless" person my opinion doesn't count for much. As I worked through Creating Christ, it reminds me of PARC (The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics, for those weren't part of the PARC Wars). Just like in PARC, James doesn't seem to want people to know there's another sider of the story. It's TheBrandens 24/7/365. But in 2005, there were no other biographies, so maybe James thought he could pull a fast one. However, every year there are dozens of new books on the New Testament from various perspectives that show Creating Christ can't be correct. He thinks that no one will read any of these books?

"Barney continues to support ARI’s affiliate The Objective Standard and ARI continues to promote Barney’s Prometheus Foundation" The Objective Standard was once an affiliate of the ARI, but there was a split after Peikoff excommunicated Dr. Diana and Biddle. They have to some extent made up, but TOS isn't an affiliate. (The ARI has its own journal, New Ideal).

I've just update Creating History. It's still a little unpolished but it's probably in completed form: https://www.scribd.com/document/449626993/Creating-History-A-Review-of-James-Valliant-s-and-Warren-Fahy-s-Creating-Christ

Yep. He doesn't know I'm transitioning, am pansexual, post-sexual, bisexual, bi-curious, intra-sexional, etc. I started the sex-plus movement before it was cool.

Michael, Glad you liked it. I just Microsoft office which comes with OneDrive. I'm finding the file system confusing and the copy I uploaded was an older version. I sent a copy to our frenemy. He responded that among other things that "You are a miserable and sexless wretch taking it out on anyone who actual does love life." And that was just for starters.

Here's the final version of my critique of Creating Christ. It's kind of rough but I don't think the book deserves more. https://www.scribd.com/document/449626993/Creating-History-A-Review-of-James-Valliant-s-and-Warren-Fahy-s-Creating-Christ

https://www.hbletter.com/objectivist-workshop-participants-identified/ Ayn Rand once remarked to me that an event doesn’t become part of history until 50 years have passed. It’s now been 50 years since the Workshops on Objectivist Epistemology were held. The Workshop comprised five meetings from 1969 through 1970 during which professionals in philosophy and related fields had the extraordinary opportunity to question Ayn Rand in great detail on her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. The tape recordings of those sessions, which were hosted by the Foundation for the New Intellectual (now terminated in favor of the Ayn Rand Institute), supplied the basis for the 200 page Appendix I edited for the 2nd edition of ITOE. The full recordings are in the Archives of the Ayn Rand Institute. None of the participants asked for anonymity regarding the Appendix, but neither did I contact all of them to secure their permissions to be named and quoted, so I thought it best to use the identifiers “Prof. A,” “Prof. B,” etc. Some questions were asked by attendees who were classed as “auditors,” though they were given a few opportunities to ask a question or two. There were only five full participants, if I recall correctly: Leonard Peikoff, George Walsh, John O. Nelson, Allan Gotthelf, and me. The rest were “auditors” or “guests.” “Auditor” is not quite the right term, because they were each given the opportunity to ask a question late in the sessions, but I can’t think of a better term. The people I list below as auditors were those who asked a question that I included in the Appendix; there were probably a few others, but either they didn’t ask a question or I didn’t include any of their questions in the Appendix. Of the full participants, three held the academic rank of “Professor,” two of “Instructor.” The auditors, I think, were all graduate students. So, “Prof.” was a device I used, rather than a description of their academic titles. Also attending as guests were: a lawyer who was a Foundation trustee and his wife, George Reisman, and Frank O’ Connor. The group met in a hotel conference room, and we sat around a big, oval conference table, the guests sitting against the side walls. The first session lasted 12 hours! Subsequent sessions were shorter, but still the total time was 21 hours. A full transcript would have run about 600 book pages. Not everyone attended every session. Sessions 4 and 5 were quite different. They were not about ITOE or epistemology; one was on metaphysics and one on ethics/politics. These two final sessions were much smaller events, held in Ayn Rand’s apartment, and there were only three questioners: Leonard Peikoff, George Walsh, and Allan Gotthelf. I was not invited. The assignment of letters for the names had no special significance: I used “Prof. A” for the first person quoted in the Appendix, “Prof. B” for the second, and so on. As noted in my editor’s preface to the Appendix, I did some re-arranging of questions: they are presented in logical order, not the chronological order in which they were asked. For the first three sessions, there was a different “main questioner,” who had the floor for an hour or two; then others took turns. Thus, my re-arrangement of questions did not interrupt any flow; each new questioner asked about whatever topic he was interested in, rather than continuing from where the previous questioner left off. A happy result of putting the questions into a logical order was that my question on the nature of the whole theory was the one that needed to go first. So I am “Prof. A.” Here is the complete list of the participants included in the Appendix. Prof. A: Harry Binswanger. Then a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Columbia University and Part-Time Instructor in philosophy at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Prof. B: Allan Gotthelf. Doctoral candidate in philosophy at Columbia University and full-time Instructor in philosophy at Wesleyian University in Connecticut. Dr. Gotthelf went on to become, among many other accomplishments, a founder and longtime head of the Ayn Rand Society, a professional organization affiliated with the American Philosophical Association. Prof. Nicholas Bykovetz. Graduate student in physics, who is now in the physics department of Temple University. Prof. John Nelson. Nelson was then in his 50s, I believe, and was in the philosophy department of the University of Colorado, Boulder. His article “The ‘Freedom’ of the Hippie and the Yippie” was published in The Objectivist. Prof. E: Leonard Peikoff, who needs no identification for this audience. Prof. F: George Walsh. Then in his late 40s or early 50s, Prof. Walsh was in the philosophy department of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. Prof. G: Fred Weiss. Graduate student in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Mr. Weiss went on to create and run The Paper Tiger, a niche publisher. Prof. H: Mike Berliner. Doctoral candidate in philosophy at Boston University, where he also taught. Dr. Berliner became the first Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute (1985 – 2000). Prof. I: Gary Lachmund. Then a graduate student in mathematics, Mr. Lachmund later went into banking. Prof. J: John Allen. Graduate student in philosophy. Prof. K: Albert Jakira. Graduate student in philosophy. Mr. Jakira ran an Objectivist study group in New York City in the 1990s. Prof. L: Tony Plasil. Graduate student in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. Prof. M: Laurence Gould. Graduate student in physics, now in the physics department of the University of Hartford.

The Hickman stuff in Rand's Journals was just stupid stuff. Although given that the Journals have been bowdlerized, maybe the original was worse.

If anyone has heard anything about this bio please let me know. I just checked Knapp's Virginia Tech page and she says she is working on a biography up to '57. There is no claim that it is "authorized."

It's interesting that Brook's main beef with Trump is immigration - a topic that Rand never wrote a word about. And Brook will never give a clear answer as to why he supports open immigration for every country except Israel.

Sunny and Doug Reich did a follow up. Quite good:

Quote Mark: I believe Amy mentioned on the debate with Ed Mazlish and Crazy Stuart that her friend Sunny Loehmann told her how unpleasant Minneapolis was becoming because of Somali immigration. Amy has since unfriended Sunny.

It's incredible to listen to Yaron Brook, who allegedly has a PhD. in something called "finance," talk out of both sides of his mouth. Do we have a good culture that can withstand potentially hundreds of millions of immigrants (which is what open immigration will result in) or don't we? Also, he's so in the thrall of the idea that everything that's wrong with the world is caused by intellectuals. Considering how bad the intellectuals are, I'm surprised that we still have a somewhat healthy culture.