Philip Coates

Subject: Brainwashing and Lack of Systematic Alternatives > are Liberals simply deluded, incompetent, or evil? Probably a mixed bag, but I think an “evil advocacy” is at work. They know truth from falsehood but prefer the falsehood. Peter, liberals in heavily liberal environments generally don't know the true viewpoints: they are neither evading not lying. I've spent much of my life surrounded by those environments - Ivy League - Boston - NYC - San Francisco -Times readers. They simply have never been exposed to cogent, thorough, and ongoing responses to the intellectual and political views that surround them**. They read only the left in school, not the best of the alternative. I didn't in college and in the liberal cities where I lived. And in the NYT comments sections where I'm active, you're often lucky to find one well-reasoned dissent from the liberal orthodoxy out of a hundred comments or two out of two hundred. And that can only give you a paragraph of a hint at a thoroughly worked out alternative view. Sometimes I even get a personal response in the comments from the NYT writer I'm criticizing since I'm the only commenter who 'stings'. Andrew Revkin did so a few weeks back. **One way I see this time after time is you present a simple counter-argument and time after time you see the most sophisticated, intelligent liberal-on-the-street caught flat-footed. It's obvious from the look of surprise or shock that he *has never heard any argument like that*.

> If you provide links to the places where you're commenting, others can quickly and easily join you in kicking the same liberals in the teeth. [Jonathan] Good point. Here is the original article and comments are at the bottom---> http://www.nytimes.c...ig-lift.html?hp Warning: If you don't read the NYT each morning, after a hundred or two comments** on an article they often close the comments. So second or third day sometimes it doesn't work. Recommendation: If you regularly read any newspaper (your hometown?) or magazine or tv website online, that might be the best place to post in a comment section. **The NYT attracts the most activity and comments of any paper. I have posted three or four in the past week and it usually takes them half a day to screen comments for profanity, personal attacks, etc....and then I get an email with a link to my latest comment. This week I've had to wait overnight for some of my comments to appear. The comments are not censored politically and -always- appear, though. [My comment just went up.]

I've long advocated using the liberal media's "comments and responses" space to puncture their lies, bad reasoning, and hypocrisy. In today's online New York Times there is an article about a man named Adelson who just donated $5 million to Gingrich's struggling campaign for President. This is a front page article attempting to slime the guy and making the usual liberal point about campaign finance laws: "The last-minute injection underscores how last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance has made it possible for a wealthy individual to influence an election." Here is a comment I posted which took me less than a minute to write: "Do you see anything wrong with a wealthy candidate influencing an election? What about a wealthy union - spending dues from union members of both parties who are compelled to join? Have you or your newspaper written any front page articles on that? What about spotlighting deep pockets among liberals and the left? Have you written any articles putting George Soros's contributions under a similarly harsh light?" This is shorter than many considerably more 'wordy' comments posted on the Times website. It also jumps quickly from point to point. Why? Will it be effective? Are comments sections read by anyone? Any reason why I didn't also comment on some of the unfair 'sliming' they did on Newt's donor and his business connections? That was in fact the bulk of the article.

At the risk of hijacking this thread - and my humble apologies in advance - Here are some comments John (remember him?) made at a talk about his career as a professor and how to have some impact in that. The whole thing is available on the ARI 'in memoriam' webpage for him. [These are my hurried notes taken from playing back the web lecture. Warning: to get it all down I drop letters, abbreviate, leave out punctuation and caps. The payoff is that I usually get -everything- the lecturer said and I don't make gross content mistakes, even if sometimes cryptic.] (") john lewis first oist to teach simult at two top 20 universities - prgm on pol, econ, philo at both..students at duke are -really- bright. but econ not exp to hist of pol, pol not exp to philo, philo not exp to the real world. he teaches ancient pol. philo - read the sources - plato, aristotle, cicero, machiavelli, etc. john's objctv not to convince but to 'mainstream ' ayn rand - seminar in which inserted 'what is capitalism' and the francisco money speech, full prof who not agree attended thanked anthem fndtn for fact able to have conf., couple weeks later calls john i'll be away can you lecture to my class - history of economics class - what readings to bone up on? no teach ayn rand. asked him why? see she's important, not certain i agree, but see that has to be read and understood and every time i open my mouth about her i get it wrong. so, you're the objvst and know what you're talking about. .... john did indep study w ar..and then 'obj philo of ar.' sixty students went thru those two course. syllabus based on 12 steps in opar. read all of atlas w 30-50 pg articles each week, 3/4 didn't drop, unusual for this sort of optional or low credit course. ...the atlas shr course. designed from scene to scene major scenes instead of synops of chapters. what is most imp scene pedagog can bring up...and always altern rdg expl disagrees. e.g., 20th cent motor car event and speech & read comm. manifesto next to that. you don't know how many students read comm. manifest and say 'that's it? this killed 50 million?' and he says yes, now you're getting something to understand the power of ideas. ...trying to become known among duke fac. as 'the greek guy' - so whenever jrnl of pol econ gets something on the greeks in it they send it to him for prepub rvw. also kn as 'the objvst' and refer to him as that. one dept chr. rec. paper on atlas and marked it up and emailed him 'would you mind looking at this - frankly i don't know what i'm doing...you're the objectivist'..he put his own comments on top of his sat down for two hour conv w student, int in rdng more..leaves a legacy.. some of these students impacted hard to know which. learned in ten years the student who walks up immed after class 'boy that was great, i'm really convinced' is lost. goes to the social work class next and says 'boy that was great...' student who walks up 'i don't wuite get what is this selfishness stuff. got to think about that' /continues to write for clsscl jrnls, writes reviews...intrstng: contacted by editor of book on (practical) medical ethics. doing 2nd ed, willing to put in chapter. read by 100k students a year. ch. on health care rights. he had article on univ rt to health care...would be glad, priv, meet deadline on one condition title is 'there is no right to health care'...contract is in the mail. ...what add up to? leave something behind in people's mind so th abou twrld in diff way. seeing great results. assn for priv ent ed went to fourth annual conf. require panel on moral fndtns din't exit five years ago..thik solely result of ari...econ was considered to be value-free, econ not have to do with ends. competing panels others want to present their moral views. /asked to sit as guest on duke med ctr ethics board, write and form policy for duke med ctr, a multi-billion dollar org. first mtg - what do w shortage of crit drugs - their idea is to ration them. asked chair if has happened yet. make more drugs - his spiel on why ratn wrong...rationing was taken out of the statement... ,,,,,, q&a (was just a.l.a. or l.t.t. orig talk - 25 or 30 min each): --three times addressed first yr class of med students on health care/medical rights. how powerful and diff. the arg is that rts are rts to action. --follow up req him to come bec of his talk prev week inv two of the dean's to hear what he had to say. how to get their attention: student says 'medicine the only prfssn where you walk into a room and someone says take your pants down and you do it' and john replied: 'you know i have no problem doing that for a doctor, but i have a big problem doing it for hillary clinton or harry reed...now can we talk about the relationship between government force and hwat is nec to treat someone medically.' --how imp is to be collegial. brad thompson at clemson, did phd. at brown while john lived in r.i. and fundmntly no one agreed w him there as no one agrees w me. how did he get thru it? two firm rules: 1-work harder than anyone else. 2-be more pleasant and collegial than anyone else. when probe mind of most profs find very deep disag. at place like duke everybody disag w everyone else at some level. embrace diff ideas in way helpful to us. there is no conc att to keep oism out of the academy. how welcoming fac has been to him. 'hes the oist, ask him' in yoiur presence. ...another rule of his: never use ar's name gratuitously, if doesn't fit in the article doesn't put her in. bec not want to be see as always going to that topic. go email from cspan to record one of his classes for am hist series. pointed out to them he was not am. historeian, that's ok we know who you are do you have any that touch on am hist at all... am defeat of japan in int relns course...five man recording team, two cameras...now avail on the cspan site. not ayn rand in it. ...in the uk, place such a high imp on learning grk..anecdote about how ded. he was in learning grk in r.i. ellen kenner: remember him studying it and occ look at road when drive with them to boston and listening to greek tape and occasionally look at the road. /john: it's said have to start early at 8 to be good at grk. john started at 37 - even laminated some grk sentences into shower so could do conjugations. (") [The above is a fraction of what he said - as indicated by the three dots] ,,,,,, [A word about my lecture notes. I have tons of them: all the Peikoff courses, individual lectures, TJS and TAS summer seminars, etc., but you have to try to figure out the abbrevs. for yourself. If this is of interest but if no one gets out of their armchair long enough to post any thoughtful response - or even "Thanks Phil, I learned x and would be interested in more" - I'm highly unlikely to do any more or them.]

> You're turning out thread topics like Frito Lay makes potato chips...Why do you expect anybody to do all this freaking work? You aren't our teacher and we aren't your students. Aww. Poor baby.

> this advice from David Brooks sounds like it came right out of...Peter Keating’s mother [ND] Now that is so context-dropping of the TYPE of cooperation possible that I don't even want to waste time untangling it.

> This problem has nothing specifically to do with Objectivism. Most people don't fulfill their highest aspirations, especially in the creative fields of art, music, writing, etc. I agree. But the "lonerism" and anger at the world and suspicion of cooperation and groups so prevalent in Oists makes what otherwise ought to be highly successful people -- intelligent, with energy, with strong ethical values -- less successful than they of rights really ought to be. And this issue of having allies and support is something which is often shunted aside. As for the request for "evidence" for my opening post --- or, by the way, for this statement of GHS's: "Most people don't fulfill their highest aspirations, especially in the creative fields of art, music, writing, etc." --- you ought not to demand from your armchair that other people -prove- a general observation like this to you. That would take a book or a transcript of a lifetime of experience. And then the question is: what would -you take- as clear, unambiguous, cash on the barrelhead proof? Did you need "data" before you would believe there were stinkers out there like Toohey, Keating, James T., etc.? Instead a post like my original doesn't expect you to be convinced by a few sentences introducing a topic or making a very broad claim. It demands a lot of mental work on the reader's part: You ought to be able, if you are perceptive, to "prove" this cause of lack of success and how widespread it is to yourself by reflection of two kinds: 1. introspection (have you had this kind of lack of success yourself for this reason?) and 2. if you have had enough experience in the circles you move in or people you have known. Which most people who are well out of adolescence have had.

Oists and the Oist movement tend way too often to be unsuccessful to a high degree in achieving their deepest aspirations. Some of it you can blame on an unreceptive or 'irrational' culture. But a lot of people succeed despite that. So a lot of blame goes to individual Objectivists and to how the Objectivist movement operates. David Brooks extracted some life lessons in his column from 'biographical summaries' he had received. Here is one that Objectivists and other ideologically-extreme or out of the mainstream but basically rational or having much to offer individuals and causes could try to figure out how to do a much much better job at: " Work within institutions or crafts, not outside them. For a time, our culture celebrated the rebel and the outsider. The most miserable of my correspondents ...were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little."

Michael, you said: p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> </p> <p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> <p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> </p> <p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><em> I have to strongly disagree. Especially with this: p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> </p> </div>

Subject: Specious Comparisons > As ever, these forums are suitable places for spitting on the graves of your opponents. [stephen] In the RoR post linked to, Luke Setzer uses comparisons to Castro. In this thread, WSS brings up Kim Jong Il. Yes, if someone were to pen an epitaph to a monster, someone with no redeeming qualities worth mentioning, it -would- be appropriate to spit on his grave in such a thread. But how much brains does it take to take to understand that John Lewis (or any Objectivist intellectual with whom you may have strong disagreements about the application of philosophy or in other areas) is not a monster, does not deserve comparisons to Castro or Kim Jong Il?

> Addressing aspects of Lewis’s professional career isn’t "spitting on his grave." [Mark] You weren't addressing "aspects"; you were only looking for negative aspects. You were using this thread to try to tear him down and have nothing positive to say about him. I already pointed out to you that you could use another thread whose purpose that might be. Some people keep evading or dodging the point about what is *appropriate* to a thread like this by changing claiming it is the same as "never speak ill of the dead" -- which no one has said.

Subject: Overachievers, Under-Puppies, Heroes, and Role Models** > If he wins next week against New England, I will start going to church again. [Dennis] Watching a game like yesterday's -is- going to church. I don't follow football much, but was rooting for Tebow and I finally figured out why: I love it when a determined athlete makes it in the big time and defies the foolish 'experts' who can't measure heart or intangibles with their conventional, physicalistic ideas of what skills are needed. Unconventional throwing style and can't play in the pocket? So he uses the run game, the long bomb, and runs it himself. Have to be over 6'2" to play quarterback in the pros, otherwise you can't see your receivers down the field over the line? Take that Doug Flutie -both in the Canadian pros and in the NFL. There was a movie this year about a sport I understand even less than football in which Brad Pitt plays the manager of an Oakland Athletics team with no money to hire stars, so they took players no one else wanted but with one skill ("he can't hit home runs, but he gets on base") who could be molded into a team. J.J. Barea is an undrafted, unknown, too short guard who finally won a bench-warming spot with the Dallas Mavericks as their "second backup" point guard. He had endless energy in last year's championship and somehow always got to the basket during the NBA Finals and who the superstar LeBron James tired out futilely trying to guard in the fourth quarter. The even shorter ("too short to play in the NBA") Spud Webb won the NBA Slam Dunk championship over a lot of near-seven footers. He's 5' 7". **I gave a well-received TAS summer conference talk called "Heroes and Role Models" a few years back.

> I don't like using eulogies or memorial occasions to discuss politics...A funeral is a hell of a place to try to persuade people of anything. And heckling (including responding in kind) and bickering at a funeral is a total waste of time. [MSK] I agree. Another thread should have been started. I started this thread to remember some positive -personal- characteristics of the man.

Stephen, I liked Machan's book on Ayn Rand, but I've long had the sense of him as writing at sometimes wordy length and many volumes on issues I was already familiar with as a longtime Objectivist, the way a good popularizer might do. Which is certainly a very important function, but is for readers at a different stage than I'm at. Nothing I can recall specifically, though. Am I unfair to him? Given that one can't keep up with all the Oists and libertarians writing, do you plan to read this and report on the above issue?

> The Wiki page on it says there were no reported deaths from T&F in the Revolutionary period [ND] Not reported doesn't mean non-existent. Why should deaths have been immediate and who would they have reported them -to-? No central government or dense web of reporters or tracking mechanisms, travel and information exchange often easier with England than up and down the colonial coast before paved roads/infrastructure.

Subject: Anarchists, Witches, and Citizenship Subthread > A baby is born in Antartica [sic]...A child is born on a ship sailing the high seas...A child is born to an American women in a foreign country......... [baal] > But you did not say, “I am not a witch.” [Peter Taylor] Peter, I often disagree with Mike Marotta, but here I want to put down my scotch and nachos and rise to the full upright position in my armchair during halftime to valiantly defend him: He is not a witch and neither is Baal Chatzaf. The scientific proof is very simple. Do the "UnderWitches Laboratory" test - to be performed separately on each man? creature?: 1. Tie each subject up so he can neither dogpaddle nor propel himself to the bottom. 2. Drop him in a giant vat of boiling water. 3. Once waterlogged, he will sink right to the bottom. 4. Everyone capable of Scientific Induction knows that all witches float: That is why they are light enough to be able to be airborne on a simple broomstick. (Side issue: Sinking is on the other hand a conclusive proof of Hidden Anarchist Beliefs.) (Second aside: In my case, I have too much body fat to sink. So witch/vampire/schoolmarm is still an open question. Science is a matter of multiple confirmatory experiments, so does anyone have a further test that doesn't involve silver bullets?)

Subject: Introspection in More Detail (continued) One important question I didn't think of in post #10: We are not always fully in touch with ourselves and make mistakes of looking inside all the time. Humans have psychological problems or difficulties. "What explains introspective errors or shortcomings?" These fall into two very broad categories, errors of commission and omission (this is true more generally of thinking errors and in fact of all sorts of errors, oversights, mistakes.) There are many ways to go off track. You can err in what you do or by not doing anything or not doing enough or by taking action of the wrong type or in the wrong way. The biggest problem is probably the relative "murkiness" of introspection. Compared to the relatively sunlit nature of extrospection, it is less easy to see or find all the material. Reminiscence requires us to dredge up things from the past which may have been half forgotten or never correctly identified. Emotions can be scary or threaten our self-esteem so we may have buried or suppressed them in a way that we don't do with the memory of an extrospective phenomenon such as a dog biting us. Also, our skills at looking inside at mental content or processes are less developed. Psychology, unlike extrospective disciplines is not yet a fully developed science, either theoretically or practically/clinically/selfhelp-wise. Just as one example, on another thread, we are still debating the nature of emotions, what causes them, and even what is a list of the fundamental ones. Imagine the state of physics if we were still imprecise or unsure about the forms of a primary area of study such as energy, if physicists were still debating if electrical, chemical, thermal, mechanical, and nuclear energy are different or about the laws and the causal chains involved. Looking at an extrospective phenomenon like the color of a sunset or what happened in a physical event such as the game of tennis we had yesterday is often more 'solid' to us. Compared to whether one is feeling sadness or in a bad mood over something hard to unearth exactly, It is brightly lit, what happens doesn't fluctuate so often and isn't so 'subterranean'. Related is the fact that it can be more difficult to identify a process than a discrete event or thing. And much of our mental content that it would be desirable to introspect about is a process. Feeling sad or angry or joyful (emotions) or confused or certain (cognitions) is not just an event, it is often a sequence of steps starting with an observation, followed by an evaluation what evidence you have or whether something is for or against you and how much so, and often integrated or related to other experiences and history. So, introspection is not self-evident. It is hard. And often we don't do it at all. Or do it inaccurately. (Clearly, none of this is to suggest that extrospective perception or thinking is always direct, accurate, or obvious. Or to suggest that there are no easy or 'self-evident' cases of looking inside yourself and perceiving that you are angry or surprised or puzzled or in doubt.)

> Dying isn’t a virtue and dying doesn’t make a bad man virtuous. [Mark] Philosophical-practical-political disagreements or mistakes don't always make a good man a bad man.

> I believe he took over after Leonard Peikoff discontinued his radio show many years ago. Dennis, my recollection was that was Andrew Lewis, who had actually worked with LP on the show for some time beforehand.

There's a good picture of him on this page: http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/blog/index.php/2012/01/john-david-lewis-a-man-who-lived/

John Lewis, an Objectivist Professor of History and specialist in the Classics just passed away after a battle with cancer. The Jefferson School Objectivist summer conferences took place alternate summers for two weeks. I met John right at the start. He was from Hartford and at that time had had a long career in insurance. Since the conferences were two weeks long, we had three 'free days'. With a conference of more than 300 people, you'd gravitate toward a small circle of maybe five, maybe ten new simpatico people and older friends and go off and do something. It was in San Diego, so you'd spend the day at Sea World or Disneyland or wind surfing or something fun. John was one of that handful of people, men and women, I felt most completely comfortable with, and often spent those days with. And even out of 300 plus people, there weren't that many that I was 'simpatico' with in temperament, spirit, sense of fun, and just being on a compatible wavelength. I was enormously impressed later on when he bootstrapped himself years later than his contemporaries into getting a Ph.D. from Oxford and becoming a professor of history and a writer of books on the classical world. What I remember most about him from that previous time -- if I can put it into words -- was a sort of down-to-earth niceness. Unpretentious. Sort of a boyish, innocent enthusiasm in personality. Not like one of those people who puts on airs and wants to impress you with his knowledge of Objectivism. (Among the people I got to know and sometimes hang out with in the later TAS conferences and among the intellectuals or academically accomplished, Ed Hudgins is perhaps the person who most reminds me of John. Which I think is why I've liked him the most among that group. And both men have a certain elusive benevolence in attitude.) Some years later at one of the post-break conferences where everyone knew where I stood, I felt like I had a ten foot airborne contagion zone around me, and all the other inner circle types were afraid or unwilling to talk to me, John had no problem seeking me out as an old friend, coming up to me as though it were the most easy and natural thing in the world, and having an easy, relaxed, pleasant social conversation about nothing in particular. I can't quite put my finger on why I use this phrase, but of all the many Objectivists I knew, the phrase "pureness of heart" somehow fit him in those Jefferson School years. He was definitely one of the good guys. The good ones die too young. You don't meet many people like John and I'll miss him.

Subject: Ongoing Mutual Respect Between Me and the Troll > that I may smack you repeatedly with a broomstick. I’ll bring a blindfolk You're already one of the true "blindfolk" around here. And if we meet under such circumstances, you are much more likely to be the one who is going to get a 'bitch slapping'. My attitude toward you on all intellectual matters is perhaps less David Carradine and more Chuck Norris: "If I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you."

> I usually do better with the humor No you don't.

Subject: Introspection in More Detail > Introspection is not memory--it is the process of looking inward, of being self-aware of one's own internal experience. [dennis h] > Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. [wikipedia] > an examination of one's own thoughts and feelings [dictionary] I find the simplest way to wrap one's head around this is from the Latin roots - extro: outward, intro: inward. It refers to the object of our awareness and thus to the form of awareness. We extrospect when we look at things outside or physical. We introspect when we look at things inside or mental. Rand captures it in extremely precise and formal language: "Extrospection is a process of cognition directed outward—a process of apprehending some existent(s) of the external world. Introspection is a process of cognition directed inward—a process of apprehending one’s own psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc. It is only in relation to the external world that the various actions of a consciousness can be experienced, grasped, defined or communicated." [iTOE, p. 29] The genus is "process of cognition." But extrospection vs. introspection is almost never either-or or a hard, absolute boundary: Consider the mental process involved If I want to reflect about the merits of living in suburban Southern California vs. Manhattan, I am neither extrospecting or introspecting exclusively (except in the sense that while thinking about this I'm looking at the facts and memories which is stored in my head). I consider data derived from extrospection: what the places are like, images from magazines, tv programs. And I consider my own deepest needs for types of people, etc. (In fact each one of those objects of attention was itself a combination of extrospective and introspective parts.) Baal asks a very good series of questions from the hard-headed point of view of a physical or empirical scientist. {I suspect these sorts of 'measurability and objectivity' questions are what led behaviorists and cognitive scientists to claim introspection as such is unreliable, subjective or personal, unscientific.] ==> 1. How does one validate introspection empirically? 2. How can [one] tell if one's visit to the "basement" is for real or just a reconstruction made to order?...Suppose you "why" yourself to the bottom. What makes the bottom the bottom and not a further step in a regress?...How do you know when to stop? 3. The human eye is built to look outward and receive inbound photons. What could "look" possibly mean? Let me take #3 first. "Look" means awareness of any kind. Since our "best-loved tool" and our primary source of acquiring knowledge is seeing with our eyes, that is the metaphor for other methods or processes of awareness: look at the facts, look inside yourself and see if you really love her, look closely at this physics problem, take a close look at how the ancient Greeks lived. Clearly mental processes (ways of 'looking') extend far beyond that of vision or sensation. As for #2: This is the philosophical problem of certainty or proof, only applied to internal matters. In some cases it's direct perception. Often only you can tell if you are fearful, happy, angry. And it's direct awareness. Can you prove it objectively, scientifically to others in a laboratory? Probably not, but so what? You -can- identify objectively if need be the chain of causes, the things that would probably make a normal person angry or sad. Now if Baal's question is can you get to the bottom of why you are seething with anger all the time, that might involve many things. It can be non-obvious and complex, just like determining every reason why the golden age of Greece had a certain sense of life or pinning down with total precision all the reasons why you love someone. It's just the way it is. You know "when to stop" when you have reached great enough precision for your purposes, just as you know when to stop in trying to un-Heisenberg the exact position and velocity, the exact spin and charge and momentum of a subatomic particle. As for #1: Well, if you mean -particular- cognitions, it depends. Some facts or states or memories are direct perception-like. I remember what the house I lived in in high school looked like and what the school looked like and my Geometry teacher. Some you may need to support with other date or with further reflection.

> If I may indulge my inner Phil here...My inner Phil hereby proclaims... You're learning, young grasshopper.