Laure

"Her writings are so pathological and hate-filled". I really don't know what writings you're referring to. Was it the part where Dagny and Hank rode the first run of the John Galt Line? Was it the part where Rearden carried Tony as he was dying of a gunshot wound, and bent to kiss his forehead? Was it the page in Anthem when the hero had discovered the word "I" for the first time in his life? Was it the end of The Fountainhead where Dominique rode the elevator up towards her hero? And pathological implies some kind of sickness. Later you accuse Rand of having Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and say that she met every one of the criteria. Here they are: 1. has a grandiose sense of self-importance 2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love 3. believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by other special people 4. requires excessive admiration 5. strong sense of entitlement 6. takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends 7. lacks empathy 8. is often envious or believes others are envious of him or her 9. arrogant affect. My evaluations (note that I was not Rand's psychiatrist -- but I bet you weren't either): 1. Sure, but is it narcissism if you really ARE "all that"?? My God, man, Atlas Shrugged was named second most influential book after the Bible, don't you think she was entitled to think highly of herself? 2. Maybe preoccupied with fantasies of ideal people, but that was HER CHOSEN JOB as a novelist. 3. Yes to the first part, no to the second. She thought she could be understood by most everyone. 4. Eh, I don't know, you'd have to have known her personally. 5. Absolutely not. She never thought anything should be GIVEN to her; she EARNED it. 6. NO. She was opposed to sacrificing others to herself. 7. Another I-don't-know. 8. NO. Her philosophy was opposed to envy, and from what I have read about her, she was not an envious person. 9. She didn't seem arrogant to me in videos of her public appearances. So, I would judge that she did not have NPD. Your accusation looks like an attempt to scare away people like Jeff, who is not falling for it. It sounds a lot like sneering to me. "Who did she think she was, being so proud of herself just because she was a best-selling author? Who did she think she was, being SO CERTAIN that she was right?" I say she had every right to be proud and every reason to be certain.

You're not getting my point. Positing the existence of something is fundamentally different from positing its nonexistence. Let's say the two of us are walking out in the desert, and we come upon a black box. You say to me, "I bet there's a raisin inside the black box." Unless I suspected that you'd planted the box there, I'd bet you there was no raisin inside the box, and I'd probably win.

There's plenty of fear to go around. I'm not "afraid that if I speak to a Muslim, I will be murdered" but I'd sure as hell be afraid to go meet with some cleric in Iraq or Afghanistan! Remember Daniel Pearl? It'd be great if more Muslims spoke out against shari'a and Islamo-fascism. But isn't it illegal to do so in many countries? It's not hard to understand why they keep their mouths shut, when you can be sentenced to death for converting to Christianity, or shot dead in the streets for wearing tennis shorts.

Well, I'd say that if there is zero evidence for something to exist, I would estimate its probability of existing at zero, not at 50%.

What on earth would "evidence of absence" look like? Dawkins says, "That you cannot prove God's non-existence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter. Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things. There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent."

Danneskjold, your "Apatheist" position holds some appeal to me, but you seem to be putting religion and atheism on equal footings. Just because we cannot disprove the existence of God, doesn't mean it's perfectly reasonable to believe in God. Richard Dawkins' position is that even though we cannot prove God's nonexistence (as nonexistence of anything is often impossible to prove), God's existence is so highly improbable that we can say that it's unreasonable to believe in God. You may not be convinced of God's improbability yet, but to understand the position, substitute something you can agree is improbable: Dawkins relates Bertrand Russell's "parable of the celestial teapot." "If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense." While it's a leap of faith to believe in God at all, the belief in the specific personal God described by any particular human religion is an even bigger leap. Just the idea that if there's a God, he wants to be worshipped, is a leap. Actually, it's psychological projection: people think "well, if I created the universe, I'd want to be worshipped for it!" I highly recommend Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and George H. Smith's "Atheism: The Case Against God".

I agree wholeheartedly with this!

I think Mark has made some good posts here, and that people are not as far apart in their opinions as they might seem. Mark doesn't want to fight ideas with force, but the thing is, in this conflict, Atilla and the Witch Doctor are the same guy! Those pointy-fingered clerics are military leaders. We cannot let militants hide behind a protective cloak of religion, or literally take refuge in a mosque or madrassah. Is this principle really something that Michael or Barbara would disagree with? Instead of accusing each other of fighting straw men or of misrepresenting other's views, let's acknowledge areas of agreement. I'm not going to suggest an answer to the problem of radical Islam because I really don't have an answer. But I wish we could stop bickering about it and realize that we all share the same core values. Nobody's advocating genocide; nobody's advocating the destruction of American mosques (correct me if I'm wrong...). We are in a tough situation, because those Islamists who say they want to destroy Western civilization really aren't that strong! If we chose, we could easily annihilate them. But we choose not to, because we don't want to kill so many innocent people in the process. If they were more of a threat and if we had already incurred a heavier cost in lost lives, ironically, it would be easier to defeat them because we would be past the point of worrying about their civilians. Look at Japan. Michael says we already won two wars handily. But did we? Did anyone surrender? I think that's the problem; it's not like Japan, where the Emperor told everyone to stop fighting. Occupying a nation before they've surrendered is a difficult situation. I think any solution has to include the idea of not enabling them, not helping them to become stronger, containing the threat, while exposing them to positive ideas that will eventually change the culture. It's not going to happen overnight.

It all goes back to the idea pointed out by Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide) and Richard Dawkins: we have been trained to give automatic respect to religious notions; the more irrational the belief, the more sacrosanct it is. If some flaky idea is part of someone's religious faith, we're supposed to just say "hey, I respect that". I'm hoping now that Dawkins has pointed this out, that it may begin to change. I went to my son's school a couple of weeks ago, and noticed that one kid had some kind of a rainbow graphic T-shirt with "God's Promise" on it (he was a real brat, too!). Made me wonder what would happen if I sent my son to school in an Atheist-themed shirt! I wouldn't actually use my son to stir up controversy like that, but I can imagine what would happen. It would be found "offensive", even though my offense at the "God's Promise" shirt would be discounted. But at least there's some hope: things aren't as bad at the University of Arizona. My husband was telling me that one of his colleages at work, a fellow optics professor, once had some fun heckling one of those crazy U of A mall preachers. I was encouraged that he apparently wasn't worried about getting into trouble for "intolerance".

Anthem is such a wonderful book. I love the way it is structured, as a journal. I don't know if this is a common device in fiction-writing, but having it in journal form is a great way to enable a first-person story to retain some suspense. The journal writer first gives us some background, and then once we are caught up to his present-day, he is always writing about events that have just happened. At no point in the book does our journal writer know how things are going to turn out - until the climax at Chapter 11 - "I am. I think. I will." Wow. The very first line of the book is just perfect. "It is a sin to write this." This is a graceful way of conveying that we are reading someone's journal, and at the same time it sucks us into the story, evoking the reaction "A sin? Wow, what's going on here?" Another thing I like is the style of writing. She captured perfectly how an intelligent person would write in a culture in which the language had shrunk back to a simplified subset. Has anyone read "Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem" yet? Is it good?

The course outline sounds really interesting. But I too have a problem with listening to over 20 hours of lectures! Not just because Peikoff's voice is annoying, but just in general I find that I can absorb information more efficiently by reading. I wish it was available in a book.

So, I'm in a bit of a lull at work so I'm reading up on C#. (They keep telling me that we'll eventually transition away from C++, so why not get paid while updating my skills?) Anyway, here's an example code snippet I ran across: public class Tester { static void Main() { // create a new list box and initialize ListBoxTest lbt = new ListBoxTest("Hello", "World"); // add a few strings lbt.Add("Who"); lbt.Add("Is"); lbt.Add("John"); lbt.Add("Galt"); // test the access string subst = "Universe"; lbt[1] = subst; // access all the strings for (int i = 0;i<lbt.GetNumEntries();i++) { Console.WriteLine("lbt[{0}]: {1}",i,lbt); } } } (from Microsoft's MSDN Magazine) ...just had to share!

Really good post, Shayne. I agree.

Thanks for the warm welcome, everyone!

Sounds like Jolie may be a done deal, but my vote, if it mattered, would be for Jodie Foster. Angelina Jolie is definitely too much of a sexpot for Dagny. Jodie Foster, on the other hand, would make a great "adding machine in a skirt" -- until she puts on her evening gown, at which point she can look glamorous. Plus, she just looks smarter than Angelina.

Hi Sujane, your Chapter 1 really drew my interest and made me want to read more. I agree with the other criticisms so far, though. I want to know why Jane is there! Gosh, why did she even linger long enough to do the interview? I hope your story will show us the answer, and that even though it was an awful job, it was an improvement over whatever came before in Jane's life. Will you have future installments for us? I have thought about writing a slightly-fictionalized autobiographical story as well. I've got some wonderful stranger-than-fiction anecdotes from my days as a front desk clerk at a Best Western! Can anyone shed some light on the legal issues involved? I mean, you often see disclaimers about "any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental." Well, what if it's not coincidental at all? Can you just change people's names? P.S. I also have one little grammar lesson for you. I only bring this up because it is my number one pet peeve, and it's such a simple thing: "Its" is a possessive pronoun, like "his", so it never needs an apostrophe. So, "walked through its’ doors" should be "walked through its doors". "It's" is always and only a contraction for "it is" or "it has". So, "Its hard to imagine why" should be "It's hard to imagine why". "Its'" is never used.

Hi all, I've been lurking for awhile, finally decided to register. It's nice that George H. Smith has signed up and it looks like you guys aren't going to abuse him like they did on SOLOP. Laure