Robert_Bumbalough

In this one, YB clues in students about their carbon footprints.

20 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Wolf,

I don't think you got my point. You got lost on specific examples as if they were my point. They weren't. They were easy and obvious examples I made up on the spot for clarity, not literature. And what was I trying to be clear about? I was talking about a general storytelling technique and the brain science reasons why it works.

But let's do it this way since you are caught up in the throes of the primacy of contention...

Maybe this will be clearer...

Imagine San Francisco in the 1920's, a femme fatale, a world-weary badass detective and so on. Throw in a statue of a falcon that is really supposed to be solid gold and precious jewels underneath a black coating, a falcon statue that was made during the 16th century by the Knights of Malta as a gift to the King of Spain fulfilling a tradition going back to the 1500's when an ancient mystic organization having something to do with Jerusalem (Order of St. John of Jerusalem) essentially leased land on the Island of Malta and elsewhere and paid for it to Spanish royalty with annual gold and jewel statues of falcons. What's more, this particular statue has been all over the world, with cities like Cairo cited.

I just read The Maltese Falcon by Hammett a couple of months ago. Hammett droned on and on about this history, tradition and the goddam bird. Frankly, I think that part interrupted the flow of the story, but at least Hammett changed the subject after a longish passage of nonstop explanation and right before he put the reader in a coma of boredom.   

But to my point, does that bird and esoteric ancient European history belong as a normal thing in the seedy side of San Francisco of the 1920's? Or is it out of place?

That McGuffin bird is a perfect example of my point. The only way Hammett got away with pushing the esoteric explanation and ancient history right up to the limit a popular fiction story could withstand was because it was so odd in that environment.

Notice Hammett's character orchestration, too. It's a cast of weird people against a background of normal folks. The Southern-fried fat guy (obese actually) in charge of the bad guys who is obsessed with the statue (and punwise called Gutman.. Gut Man, get it? ). The tall ship captain who crashes the private eye's office out of nowhere and falls forward like a tree ("holding himself stiffly straight, not putting his hands out to break his fall, he fell forward as a tree falls") only to die and fumble the bird. The creepy "levantine" (gay male) and his young stupid hotheaded punk lover (male, of course) who became the patsy. The pretty girl who used a pin (a "three-inch jade-headed steel bouquet-pin") to scratch and dig the hell out of her stomach, drawing blood, so she could stay awake while drugged and who somehow drifted off to nowhere to be heard from no more. And so on. 

Rather than looking down your nose at this technique (normal/ordinary background with oddity/out-of-place thing(s) in the foreground to focus the reader's attention), look at the very authors you cited and you will see them use it over and over. They're great authors.

Michael

Yeah. Mike, Wolf, Tony, Pete. Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein used this technique in their stories where characters were made to think they were in normal surroundings but really they were being tricked by magic aliens using ESP mind control.  Wow I enjoyed reading scifi when I was a kid. Then the old Outer Limits show writers and directors used similar techniques. Oh great stuff.

Cool. Dawson Bethrick posted a new blog: "Edward Feser on Ayn Rand"  wherein he interacts with Mr Feser's criticism of Objectivism's first Metaphysics Axiom: "Existence Exists".  EF argues existence does not exist and that Ayn Rand commits fallacies of "internal inconsistency and trivializing philosophy."

http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2018/05/edward-feser-on-ayn-rand.html 

5 hours ago, anthony said:

Hi Robert, From what I 've seen, they haven't -  and MSK affirms. "Love at first sight" -- in my experience, is a notion to be handled with kid gloves. "Attraction" at first sight, there is no doubt. But does his/her outward appearance match anyone's inner state, their lasting qualities? And how acutely insightful is one at an early stage of getting to know the woman? Not reliably, to my knowledge, and several times outer and inner have painfully differed (alternately, may be pleasantly surprising). "Attraction" naturally is of one's senses: looks, vision, etc., - ultimately to touch (one hopes) and if the sense-perceptions are what we first know about the reality of a woman - in a nice conceptual tie-in, one's integration and evaluation - from further experience with her - confirm or contradict the first impressions to gain a 'concept' of her(his), um, full package. I venture Rand's idea is that a crucial part of love is in one's initial, also, ongoing physical attraction, and so a necessary part of what, sometimes, may, could follow. For certain, by AR, one shouldn't brook a physical-'spiritual', animal-rational (body-mind) split, in romantic love as in every other way.

There was an excellent book by Branden which I mostly forgot and I can't refer to (never lend out favorite books): The Psychology of Romantic Love. 

Hi Tony. Thanks for an insightful reply. I was wondering about all that. In several years I hope to have read through the books and will then have a better understanding.  Until then, it's back to work time.

10 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

...the concept is something happening that doesn't make any sense, but ends up making a lot of sense in the end.

 

Yeah. That's it. After I slept on it for a few nights my little brain churned out an epiphany. Ayn Rand spent years spilling ink and wading reams of typing paper to fabricate 900 or so pages developing Dagny's character as a classy top shelf individual with a very strong pride and work ethic and then she has her do the misplaced sex scene to seal the deal with Galt, and that triggered my WTF moment. 

Yeah. Been clean and sober for quite a while, but got lucky back in the stoner and lush days so avoided death and jail. Yeehaw. Life is good. 

2 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Robert,

I have that work, but I haven't even read it. I'm not going to pretend why, though. It's a looooooooooong-ass book. And I don't need to be convinced that capitalism is good with a slew of examples. In short, a little voice keeps telling me to not start because I will get bored beyond endurance.

 

I eventually read these things, though. As I will read this one. And I will probably find my inner voice, once again, to be wrong...

Michael

Reisman shows what and how Marx straw manned Adam Smith on the Labor Theory of Value and David Riccardo on the Iron Law of Wages while inventing a false doctrine Reisman calls the Primacy of Wages as the framework of the Capitalism Exploitation theory and why that frame work doesn't do what Marx claimed. The book has a thorough index and table of contents that allows one to quickly locate topics. It's worth becoming familiar with the book if one wishes to argue for capitalism with the kids taken in and wool blinded by postmodern skepticism and having an undue affection for socialism. 

Hi Mike. Okay. My little response goes:

// I'm not so bothered by this. I've had a life where all kinds of things happened--both passively and actively--that didn't make sense, but I found out later they did. Really crazy things. I've written about a lot of them here on OL. //

Okay. Cool. Clue me in. If there were only one that captured the essence of the concept, which would it be?
 

// As to literary license, I'm not of the camp who uses this term as a Get Out Of Jail Free card for stupidity. From my studies in neuroscience, modern psychology, etc., and applying it to storytelling, I have a perspective I don't read very often in O-Land. It deals with the way our minds are made and Rand's intuitive use of it in her fiction. // 

She's way under rated. AS is great story telling. Although, I'd have liked it if the looter bosses were bit more like Cuffy Megis or more like NKVD thugs of the 1930s solidifying Uncle Joe's power by crushing the Ukranians. I love the way she describes the character's emotional and psychological states with the long paragraphs of metaphores, similies and allusions to the reader's shared mental configurations and experiences.

// Both in reality and in storytelling, our minds only pay attention to the ordinary to set a background--the frame. Then our awareness leaves focus on it. We pay great attention to the extraordinary. Since a story is a an abstraction at a higher level than watching and groking (I loved Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land".)  an event, if you want your audience to pay attention, you better goose up the extraordinary parts. That's how storytelling works and has worked ever since before cavemen drew pictures on cave walls.//

Has someone created a set of lesson plans for a seventh or eighth grade literature class built around AS? 

// Authors who spend a lot of words (pretty or otherwise, with metaphors or just plain description) writing about a protagonist who wants to drink some milk walking up to a refrigerator, opening the door, getting the carton of milk out, pouring a glass, drinking it, putting the carton back and putting the glass in the sink don't tend to get wide audiences.  Let there be a cockroach in the milk, or let blood coming out of the carton, or diamonds, and you suddenly have a story worth paying attention to. // 

Oh yeah. Same deal with work. Same-ole-thing gets dull; que up something different in context of a deadline and watch the crew work their magic.

// Rand intuitively knew that placing strong visceral events in incompatible surroundings got a lot of attention. (After all, she studied and learned a lot of her fiction writing techniques in Hollywood from people like Cecil B. DeMille and his assistants, etc.) Her purpose in using "literary license" was not to explain the unexplainable like the post-moderns do (like when they join Ozzie and Harriet with Beverly Sills and Daffy Duck and Genghis Khan), but to get you to focus on what she found important. Clashing surroundings (a train tunnel) with The Big Event (first time at lovemaking) can even prompt the parts of our brain that deal with symbols since that's the way symbols work. So we can imagine symbolically that her love for Galt had to start from the ground up despite all the fanciness she had built up in her life. Go down that rabbit hole and it starts getting fun. // 

Wow. Good Stuff. Andrew Bernstein should read this and work the idea into the next edition of his Cliffnotes for AS.
 

// I wish Rand had written more about her selection of events from a visceral perspective, but she didn't. She mostly said they had to add up logically to a climax (according to her method of outlining plots) and things like that. But think of the big events in her books, Roark blowing up a housing project (or, hell, going Freud and Roark in a rock quarry jackhammering into solid granite as Dominique looks on in lust  ), or any of the major events in AS. Even when Rand wrote about mundane things like eating, like the scene when a bum told Dagny about the meeting at the Twentieth Century Motor Company where Galt walked out, notice that she was eating with a bum and he was before a woman who had just saved him from being thrown off a moving train and suddenly he got an unexpected fancy meal when he was starving. That, to me, is a hell of a way to set up storytime (or, for the more literary, set the context for a story within a story) than having a character say, "Once upon a time..." or "That reminds me of...") //

It's been a long time since I've read a fiction book. I've been putting this one off for twenty years at least. If I'd have read Rand when I was a kid, I'm confident my life would have been much more productive. Better late than never. My mind is me, and I'm my most valuable asset and keeping me right and in training is a good reason to take time to read AS.

// They don't.

Most of them just don't talk about it.

If that sounds like a cop-out by them, it's probably because it is. //

Gee what a shame. The lefties are as wrong headed as the religious conservatives, so rational people need to find a way to talk about ideas and persuade others to lay off Identity Politics and Virtue Signaling before push comes to shove.   

//You have no idea how irritated I get at O-Land people who miss the deep value of Rand's work while they defile her surface reality with worship and revisionist history.//

Peikoff's loyalty oath thing was shut down pretty quick on his lawyer's advice, but Binswanger's lectures agreement was pretty much the same sort of thing. Either one gave those who found Objectivism unsavory, like Rothbard, a talking point to slander the O-landers as cultists.

// The first cannot see Rand's errors and fudges, and the second cannot see her insights and talent. // 

Well said. 

// You have a quirky way of looking at Rand as you read her. //

I'm my own man and I think for myself or at least I like to pretend I think for myself. The O books are on my read list and it'll take some time to get through them. 

// I like it, even when I don't agree with it, because I feel it's your own independent mind chugging along, not a group-think script.// 

Hell if everybody agreed, it'd be a pretty damn boring blog.

// (And, for entertainment value, I'm starting to see a dirty old man among your inner archetypes... And that bothers me because I resonate with it... It makes me wonder about me...  ) //

We're men and we're hard wired to appreciate the fine points of female sexual characteristics. Ayn Rand knew that as does every woman. That they take such pains to look good for us despite that they don't know us should make us proud at least a little. It's what makes the world go around so it is said by many. 
 

46 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Robert,

LOL...

If, by Stockholm Syndrome, you mean a mighty attraction to Galt, Dagny had the Stockholm Syndrome before the novel even started. Recall the scenes where she is alone and asking herself with longing about the who is out there, does he exist?, and so on. (I'm paraphrasing, but that is the essence.)

If you mean Dagny being brainwashed into thinking things she did not formerly believe like Patty Hearst was, that's not her nature. Galt did not convince Dagny of anything. All he did was give words to what she already believed in. The dramatic tension comes from her believing in contradictory things and demanding moral consistency of herself. Galt would not let her fudge her commitment to that consistency except when the power of love--love for the highest--overwhelmed them both and they had to seize the moment.

Like it or dislike it, agree or disagree with it, that is what she was portraying. 

btw - I have no idea what a BGC is. I tried to look it up but the things I came up with don't make any sense re your comment (bad girls club, bong gym chill, global brokerage company, etc.).

Michael

Hi Mike. Thanks. Now I get it. (BGC = big galt cock ) Been reading too much 4chan pol lately. I love the arguments between the capitalists, the commies, the anarcho-libertarians, and the statists-moocher-looters. Funny the capitalist guys never mention Reisman or any ideas from his book "Capitalism".  

2 hours ago, ThatGuy said:

That is a grossly misunderstood interpretation of that scene.

Hello TG. Thanks for leaving a comment. Yeah, I'm wrong about most stuff, so no surprise. Nonetheless, I still don't get it despite having read Bernstein's Cliffnotes on AS; he doesn't discuss the sex scene in p3c5. What was Rand wanting the reader to understand from having Dagny and Galt, who are characters with definite senses of self pride do it like animals in a dank dirty tunnel on burlap sand bags while Dagny's all dressed up and Galt is filthy in his greasy monkey coveralls instead of having them go out so Galt could buy her a drink first. Was she saying animal sex attraction via the Birds and Bees trumps reasoning as Wolf suggested with the hot water seeks it's own level remark, or was she meaning the contrast between this sex scene and the lack of sex in the month at Galt's house in the Valley was to be understood as Dagny's way of converting over to the Striker faction?

13 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Robert,

Ayn Rand believed in love at first sight. She said so when describing her meeting Frank.

You seem to not resonate with her character Dagny. In your comments, do I detect a predilection for monogamy? 

 

(I, for on, have this prediction. Although, I seem to be more of live and let live type than you in judging other people's happiness.)

Michael

Hi Mike. Well I really like the Dagny Character. My surprise was in that Rand has Dagny disregard her love for the rail road and Hank Rearden and productivity to have hot greasy sex in a dank tunnel on burlap sandbags with a stinky grease monkey Galt as if reasoned evaluations of values were trumped by genetic determinism. Rand could have at least had them go on a date and have John buy her dinner first.  How many guys have you ever known who scored when they were stinky and dirty and on the job with a super hot engineering babe wearing formal evening attire? Yeah literary license: and it does move the story. Character dramas are that way; plot is driven by character reactions to situations.  On the philosophy end of the scene, how does an Objectivism scholar reconcile Rand's Love-At-First-Sight belief with her stand against psychological determinism? 

8 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Dazed and confused. Look at what Rand has done to you.

--Brant

Good morning. Thanks, I hope you have a nice day. 

9 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

 but we both spent a decade wooing Rand for the film rights while she was still alive.

Good Morning. Thanks for taking time. Those are good points. Having lived my little life in a low sexual energy condition, I'd forgotten what it feels like to let go and feel pride for having slept in the wet spot; so yeah, the sexual energy attraction thing drives the Atlas story like Birds and the Bees drove Rand's genotype, but did Rand intend for the reader to  understand Dagny and Galt were helpless victims of their phenotype as if they were controlled by their sexual passions? Kudos, nonetheless, would, if Dag and John were real, be rightfully showered on Galt for a groovy touchdown celebration dance after doing Dagny on sand bags in the tunnel. For crying out loud, she'd have been digging on having his greasy handprints on her boobs.

I'm still reading the Galt Speech in c.7 and am wondering if later on  Rand has her go full on 'Patty Hurst' for whatever John says as if she has Stockholm Syndrome for some BGC. 

Ahh Gee Whiz. What was she thinking? Why did Rand make Dagny go and have a sex break with John Galt in the friggin train tunnel on burlap sand bags? In Part 3 chapter 5, Rand has Dagny get to the terminal pronto from the fancy dinner in the smoke filled back room with the Looter Bosses and brother James. The rail road comes to a halt because the interlocking signal system breaks down, and there's Dagny dressed in formal evening attire giving orders to send out the men with lanterns to be the signals. Then she sees Galt among the workers in his greasy overalls, so she takes off into an unused tunnel. Galt follows, they do it. Rand's graphic detail of their sex would be at home in a classy skin mag, but meanwhile Traggert Transcontinental is going to hell in a hand basket. Dagny would rather bang Galt than TCB even though Galt's CV is way weaker than Rearden's! ** So why did Rand make Dagny love Galt more than Rearden even though Galt was mouthing Hugh Aston instead of inventing his own philosophy and had walked away from 20th Century instead of commercializing his invention like Rearden did his metal and instead of how Dagny stayed with Taggert Transcontinental despite that it was de facto owned by the looters and controlled by her "viscious moocher" brother James?  Given directive 10-289, that state of affairs couldn't hardly be dissimilar to what happened at 20th Century Motors with Ivy Starnes and "The Plan". **  What was Rand getting at by making Dagny abandon her values to take Galt as her lover? Did this have anything to do with Rand's affair with Branden?

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

Auto audio sucks. I won't be back here.

--Brant

Hi Brant. Thanks for the comment. I apologize for offending you; I suck at cycling and can barely crank for 20 miles. On the other hand, the ARI guys are thoroughly smeared over at SoloPassion in context of orthodox Randian O-ism, so maybe Pete's take is more proper. Hell,  after all these years I'm still trying to get through the books. Jesus; I must be some kind of kooky rotter. Wolf told the truth. Gold and Crypto baby. That's the ticket.  Okay then, back to work and put your backs into it.

Happy Memorial :) 

3 hours ago, Robert_Bumbalough said:

ARI's The Atlas Project panel discussion or AS Part 3 chapter 4 with the passage I was referring to above makes good listening.

3 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

I voted for Trump to use him as my very own personal  political I.E.D.  I think of our Donald as a Stink Bomb  which I helped to toss into the midst of government.

 

Hi BC. Good one. The USG is far from what the founders and framers intended, so any Prez who deregulates to lessens the scope of Uncle's power is doing right by me. The Federal Reserve thing makes us all slaves to and addicts for the dollar, so there can't be, as Wolf pointed out, a Galt's Gulch. Nevertheless, O-ism is mostly about getting one's own head screwed on straight, so that on balance the pros outweigh the cons makes me think I don't have to go eat a bullet.

Been further reading AS. Currently at part 3 chapter 4 that section where after Cheryl and James Taggert have a discussion of fundamental values about what makes one be what they are that results in James throwing a hissy fit and slamming the door on Cheryl and that she then goes to visit Dagny  and apologize for insulting her at the wedding. That dialog speaks to me and makes me cringe at how much my life has been in some ways like the fictional James Taggert. Oh crap. I have dishonored all rational persons by going along with the "rotter" and "moucher" ideology absorbed when I was a child, so now all these years later I find I need to work on my mind to get rational. The audio book of that section is linked. Cool.On to the next deal where I've an opportunity to earn a bit of being worthy.

7 hours ago, Peter said:

If you could get into a way-back machine would you vote for President Trump in 2016 and in 2020? Who are the democrats going to come up with? Who wants to waste a vote on a loser? The only people who will run against Trump are jockeying for position.   

Hi Pete. Yeah. I voted for Trump for two reasons. I thought he was the lesser evil by virtue of his seeming incompetence and because Hillary is a crook guilty of thousands of counts of the espionage law that BTW disqualifies an offender from holding elected office.   Surprisingly, Trump is doing pretty well despite the silly rhetoric and speech snafus. Love the tax cut, the deregulatory  regime, the wall, a strong military, cancelling the Paris Accord and the Iran Nuke Deal. Love the hard line on the Norks. Don't like the kow towing to religious mystics, but I do love the booming economy. Jesus H Christ, I'm busier than an one legged man in a sack hopping race. Love how Trump backs the Blue. Cops need help crushing violent felons, but I wish he'd stay off Twitter. 

Time to mow the lawn. Chat ya later.

Hello Sports Fans. It's that silly time of year again wherein mid-term election campaigns are increasing activity. With the caveat in mind that one's own self is the most easy person to fool, I find myself faced with choosing the lesser evil. Should I vote for the lefty collectivists who will legislate for higher taxes, more regulations, more government controls over my life while virtue signaling to their SJW supporters, or should I vote for the conservatives who are equally delusional as their lefty adversaries but who will legislate for lower taxes and less government control of my life and the lives of the citizens even though the later politicians bloviate to appease fanboys-and-girls of religious mythology? Would I be sacrificing and living for those fan-smucks if I press the button for their preferred candidate? And if I did that would I be not loving myself?

Would an Objectivist philosopher think they would require a suprelative analogy to infer to a process of self-inflicted sacrifice by compromising to vote for the lesser evil or would an O.P. decide to err on the side of caution and boycott an election between a scientism leaning collectivist statist lefty control freak vs a primacy of consciousness religious mystic neo-tribalist and corporatism fan? What's a kitty to do? 

Informative presentation

Quote

At the very end, Anthony Johnson made a call to identify psychopaths like his ex and breed them out of the human race by refusing to sleep with them. According to him, they do not breed among themselves because they can't stand their own kind. So they will eventually die off and be eliminated from the human gene pool if the good people do not mix their DNA with them. To prove he's rational, he acknowledged that this is a long-term project.

Hi Mike. How does Mr Johnson reconcile his views of genetic determinism with O-ism's free will doctrine Ms Rand wrote about in Galt's speech regarding the virtue of pride.

Quote

—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice

How does one go about shaping one's core emotional responses (soul?) into an image of what they've adopted from O-ism as their moral ideal? 

Thanks. 

Hi there and good morning Mr Devoon.  

Good one. Yeah, okay. I'll make it more explicit in honor of Atlas Shrugged.

<Digression> (I finally finished part 2 and then viewed the AS part 2 video. It fails to capture the psychological development of the characters. Although the misplacing of Richard Halley's bug out with Galt was an attempt at flavoring a psycho-epistemological evolution by way of contrast and thus an effort avoiding the omniscient narrator trope.)  </Digression.>

 I was making a literary allusion to one of the themes used by Ayn Rand in her famous novel.  Your incredulity speaks to my motivation in asking for a diagnosis of constipation, but my hobby has no bearing.  Stop evading. Tell me the truth. Are we slaves because we use US Dollars? If so, to where can one escape?  Would that be avoidable if they stopped using USD and switched entirely to crypto?

Cheers  

To be an Objectivist does not depend upon adhering to the Striker's Oath, or does it? If one is not an Objectivist unless they adhere to the Striker's Oath, then no US citizen or legally domiciled person within the legal jurisdiction of the United States can be an Objectivist due to their enslavement via the Federal Reserve System making them and all US citizens and legally domiciled persons within the jurisdiction of the United States surety collateral or guarantors against the debt obligation of the US dollar relative to all such persons. Yikes! Time to bug out to a secret valley, otherwise one is merely helping moochers and looters destroy one's own self, if one wishes to live objectively. I hope this is wrong. Tell me I need gentle overnight relief and that I should be happy that the big box store is having their annual laxative jamboree.

"They're all aristocrats, that's true," said [Ellis] Wyatt, "because they know there's no such thing as a lousy job, only lousy men who don't care to do it." ~ 'Atlas Shrugged' Part 3 c.1 p.720