Michelle

If I come off as condescending, I don't mean to be. And I'm not fear-mongering. But I do think there is a difference between a rational fear and an irrational fear. If these "dangerous Islamists" were merely individual nutjobs, I wouldn't think much more of it. Every ideology has its extremists. The problem with Islam is that even many of the supposedly "moderate" Muslim leaders harbor dangerous, potentially lethal beliefs. And this is because their beliefs are perfectly legitimate within the context of their religion. What to do about them? To be honest, I have no idea. But that doesn't make a sober assessment of the danger Islam poses to the rest of the world illegitimate. And the simple fact is that "extremists" are not the only dangerous ones. Heck, they might even be the less dangerous ones, since the moderates have access to the mainstream of society. From what I've seen, we don't disagree on anything of a factual nature. So I would ask why you're reacting so violently to what I said? I'm not a Geert Wilders, and I'm certainly not a Bob.

You do realize that there were prominent Muslim leaders, in England, not Iran or some other Middle-Eastern death pit, who were agreeing with Khomeini's fatwa. Not only that, but supposedly "civilized" people were ACTUALLY WILLING TO KILL RUSHDIE THEMSELVES IF THE OPPORTUNITY PRESENTED ITSELF. Hell, even the Muslim Parliament supported the fatwa. These aren't psychos or minority viewpoints. What the hell can you say about people, full citizens of a first-world nation like England, who are willing to kill a man for writing a novel in order to defend the faith? I especially fear for America. How many Muslims here would be willing to turn martyr for the glorious Allah once things intensify in the Middle East?

What are "thoughts" if they're immaterial? Or, more precisely, what is the immaterial composed of?

He stood and adjusted his suit jacket so that his body didn't betray his shameful weakness. He walked toward her and sat informally on the edge of her desk. "Why make a product when you can make dollars? Right this second, I'm earning millions in interest off money I don't even have." Oh, yes, that sounds EXACTLY like something Hank Rearden would say. If these miserable little communists want to make fun of ATLAS SHRUGGED, the least they could do is read the damned novel first so they can understand what it is that they're ridiculing.

Yeah, I'd like to see how good you look that close-up to a camera at her age.

I've confirmed The Ambassadors as unreadable. I should also add Infinite Jest to the list: I've only read a few paragraphs of it, and already it has made my eyes glaz over twice. I'm not enduring 1000+ pages of this rubbish.

What, apparently people here were under the impression that every Muslim man was an irrational savage with gore dripping from his jaws? Of course, it is important to realize that murderous beliefs and a civilized attitude are not mutually exclusive. Even "moderate" Muslim leaders were calling for Salmon Rushdie's head, after all.

I know of no reason for thinking so. As to Einstein he was no more of a socialist than many European intellectuals were at the time (end of 19-th and early 20-th century). Also his disgust with German nationalism made perfectly good sense. He was opposed to Germany taken military actions after the assassination of Franz Josef in Sarajevo. The Great War was utter and unnecessary madness and Einstein was right in opposing it. Ba'al Chatzaf Have you read Einstein's essay in support of socialism? It isn't long.

She didn't. As to her perhaps having sex with him but this not being included in the book, don't you think that, with the degree of importance attached to sex by the characters, that it would be manifestly obvious in Dagny's attitude toward Eddie? Also, there is a scene where she mentions to Rearden that she had one other love besides him. The reader knows that it is Francisco. Why would she lie about it? Dragonfly: isn't your insinuation that Dagny should have slept with Eddie on occasion... well, somewhat insulting? Dagny treats sexual intercourse as something noble and life-affirming. She doesn't degrade herself by allowing a man she doesn't love to have sex with her out of pity. If she had occasionally slept with Eddie Willers, she would have degraded herself, Eddie, and their relationship.

:lol: Good. Maybe people won't be clamoring over eachother so quickly for the free lunch now.

Well, one thing is for sure: this place is exhausted soil for her. She has been deliberately confusing discussions for months, and everyone has followed the same route: they talk to her seriously, because she acts 'innocent and interested,' if you will, to discover what they believe. After a while, they start getting frustrated because she acts daft and all their discussions go in an incomprehensible circle. Eventually, they start wising up and noticing patterns to her behavior. Suspicious patterns. You don't have to know NLP techniques to realize she's just messing with you. Eventually they either end up ignoring (as I usually do now) or insulting her. I don't like speculating about motives, because I feel it is none of my business, but I think you're probably right about *why* she's doing this. She's not a troll, since she's not trying to just rile shit up. She's obviously not interested in serious discussion. She can't be here for pleasure: she shares no common values with the people here, and she is constantly being insulted.

Weyl's forte was mathematics. In this he was one of the best. He also invented the gauge concept in physics (Eichinvariantz). Ba'al Chatzaf Sorry, I was actually referring to Einstein there. Weyl was a socialist too?

Why not "patriotic paranoids?" I appreciate the sentiment, but I doubt Obama will be rounding people up for the ovens any time soon.

Good quote, although most of the quotes attributed to him are abominable, and having skimmed his essay on why he supports socialism, I am not given to thinking that he is a particularly lucid thinker when it comes to politics, either.

I'll never read The Ambassadors. That's more than twice the length of something he wrote previously that I was unwilling to finish. He's just a really, really horrible writer. Funny fantasies about those reports. I've often wondered what kind of agony it must be to sift through thousands of plain bad submitted manuscripts for a publishing house.

"Narrative skill" indeed. Read this review of The Ambassadors. An excerpt: The Ambassadors offended me. I love the English Language as much or more than I love anything else. To see it desecrated, violated, humiliated in this way was painful. Painful. Halfway through (literally - I wrote a table with percentages in increments of 10% so at any moment I could tell how far I had to go) the book got a little interesting, just for a page or two. An interesting little plot twist occurred. So the book is flawed even in its imperfection. Because of those two pages, it is not as bad a novel as possibly could exist. I'm afraid you don't believe me. I will give you two more pieces of evidence. First of all, in 1903 two chapters were reversed. It was a blatant error. The chapter that took place in the evening was followed by the one that took place in the morning. In the former chapter, a character referred to a conversation that hadn't happened yet. A horrible error you think, right? Henry James fans would be complaining and yelling, right? Well, it remained unnoticed for FIFTY YEARS. You heard me; for half a century people were talking about and analyzing this book, forcing students to read it, and never noticed that two of the chapters were in the wrong order. The error was finally noticed by a Stanford Undergraduate, Robert Young, in 1950. Literary James scholars were anxious to get a quotation from this brilliant young man who had made such a significant discovery. What words of praise for James would their new hero give them for posterity? Let's quote Robert Young: "There must be something radically wrong with a writing style that has managed to obscure an error of this magnitude for so many years from the probing eyes of innumerable readers, publishers, editors, critics, and even the author himself." Finally, my ... wife, Laurel, was hearing me say that this was the worst novel I had ever read. She was sympathetic, but it started to annoy me that she didn't really understand, because she only thought she knew what bad writing was. So do you all, as I said above, until you've read The Ambassadors. So I asked her to read a paragraph (which was about three quarters of a page). She read two pages, disbelieving, only putting it down out of fears of harming our unborn child. I took notes as she spoke. "That's... horrible. ... The whole book is like that? Nothing but phrases and commas? Each sentence should have been 18 words shorter... Wow, I really don't like him... I could have finished The Scarlet Letter if this was its competition." This characterizes The Turn of the Screw pretty well too. There is no narrative skill, it's just poorly written, like a bad parody of the worst aspects of Victorian writing.

Sweden is great for blonds and the first sex change operation (Christine Jorgeson) - so it is ok to be confused about Sweden. Nuh-uh. Lili Elbe. 1930. Germany. That was the first semi-modern instance of SRS. She died as a result, though. Transsexuals have been castrated throughout history, of course, as SRS is complex and only recently has medicine become advanced enough to pull it off.

Don't worry. Anyone who isn't an irate gender-feminist will know that you're not limiting your comment to the coarser sex.

OK. I've never studied NLP. How exactly is the comment supposed to influence my behavior and thinking? Influence/manipulate it in what way? I thought she was just taking a shot at me, but this is actually interesting.

I have an aversion to leaving books unfinished, but there are a few... I have yet to finish The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, despite repeated attempts to do so. (I was finally able to finish the movie version on my fourth go through without falling asleep, and found the other films mildly enjoyable. Maybe the same will be true of the other books when I try again. But that first volume...) Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett. All three of these "novels" are nigh unreadable. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce... but has any living human being read every word of this... thing? The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Pretty much the most terribly written "classic" I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. Funny that I couldn't finish, considering how short it is (my copy was just shy of one hundred pages long). Engendered in me a life-long hatred of this writer. Reading similar reactions people have had to The Ambassadors only reinforces my opinion that he is the lowliest creature to ever put pen to paper. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Another remarkably short book. It is just SO boring. My eyes glaze over a sentence or two in, and stay that way. As to books I haven't fully read... Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre is overall a decent volume overviewing various existentialistic philosophers, but the translation of some of Karl Jasper's stuff in this volume is awful. I only got so far through his section before just skipping to the next bit on Heidegger. Several people I have met have struggled to finish The Brothers Karamazov, but I never had a problem with it.

Life is one big learning experience, Michelle. When I think back at what I believed in at your age as opposed to now, the difference is dramatic. You too will be surprised at what lies ahead of you. Fasten your seatbelt, for it is going to be a rough ride at times. I have always been eager to learn, and have never asked myself the question "What do Í need to learn" with the connotation that I needn't learn because I know already. Do you really believe that exists anything like objective morality? Will such claim stand up to the scrutiny of checking its premises? It won't, Michelle. On the contrary, how to tap into to their full potential and use it. If you honestly seek for the truth and don't stop in your quest, you will get there. Well said, Michael. Life experience is one of the best teachers anyway. You said that you taught "empathy" and "independent thinking," then fingered me and someone else as needing to "learn" these things. You did not just spout the obvious generality that "everyone needs to learn something." As I don't see how I am lacking in either empathy or independent judgment, I found this puzzling.

But that piece is another illustration of how inconsistent Rand could be. In AS the ultimate villain is Dr. Robert Stadler, the scientist who sold his soul to the Devil (the government as financier of scientific research). But in Apollo 11 she waxes quite lyrical about a scientific/technological state project. Sure, she pays lip service to her own principles, writing: But this sounds like a lame excuse by belittling the whole issue of financing as an unimportant detail, like "oh, I admit that it's not the proper province for the government, but what the heck, it is a magnificent achievement and that is what counts". Here she ignores the fact that without government financing the whole Apollo project would never have been realized. So she wants to have her cake and eat it too. Either you condemn government financing of science and technology or you pay a lyrical homage to a state project, but not both. In fact we see here the same inconsistency as in her view on art, when she is extremely insistent on selectivity in choosing the subject ("That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art") but cheerfully abandons that principle when she sees a painting of a crumbling wall by the third-rate artist Capuletti. So it seems that her principles are not so fundamental after all. So one should blind oneself to greatness because one disagrees with the means used to realize it?

Michelle, calm down, you fume like the train in your avatar. Why? I'm not brainwashing anybody; as for brainwashers, they are always operating on the principle of alleged objective values which they then try to impose on others. What I'm doing is checking the premises of Rand's work. Have you checked them too? If yes, what conclusions have you reached? Re Rand's heroes: You brought up an important point a while ago on an another thread where you commented on John Galt coming across as almost 'battery-operated'. True. But somehow you stopped there, and I'like to take it from there. To me, that brave new world of Galt's Gulch is no haven for individualists at all, but more a rigid (almost collectivist) community with the "leader" John Galt resembling a 'Big Brother is Watching You' type. I'm interested in your opinion on that, Michelle. Would you have liked to live there? How is Galt's Gulch "rigid" and "collectivist?" Certainly I wouldn't want to live there, but I don't really like being around other people anyway. You said I needed to "learn" something. What do I need to learn? Moral relativism? How to permanently retard my rational faculties?

On re-reading my posts in this thread: Goodness, but I can be a right bitch! Here's how it is, Phil. I like having a little bit of a quote train to easily reference the connections between previous posts. But since it seems to disturb you, I'll try to remember to cut it before it gets too long.

The comments are hilarious. "To whoever is currently manufacturing and selling those flags..... I will personally and legally hunt each of you down for the sole purpose of making citizens arrests and prosecuting each and every one of you to the fullest extend of the law under US Code pertaining to The Flag of The United States of America. Understand this.... you have every right in the world to support the person you voted for and I will stand right in front of you in the line of fire to defend that right. But the instant you put a single man on a higher pedestal than the law, whatever games you are playing are over and you lose..... maybe forever. I'm comin' after you and you cannot hide behind any anonymous nickname or IP address. I'm guessing those flags are made in China, or by a company owned by a George Soros entity. Kenny Solomon" "Hey Kenny Solomon, You stupid inbred son of a bitch!!!! I have a flag just like that with Obamas face on it... COME TRACK MY ASS DOWN YOU FUCKING RIGHT WING LUNATIC!!! GO AHEAD. I'm waiting with a loaded shotgun; Come try to citizens arrest me you wingnut and I'll blow your fucking head off!!! come on. BRING IT ON YOU PANZY PIECE OF SHIT. I bet you're flying that yellow "don't tread on me" bullshit flag.. YELLOW STANDS FOR THE PIECE OF SHIT COWARD THAT YOU ARE... if not , come right ahead.... citizens arrest by a right winger!!! that'll be the fucking day." "I'll even give you my address you dickless son of a bitch.... I'm going to start mailing U.S. flags around with Obamas face on it just to piss you fuckers off!!! ... Anything to see a conservative sweat... you might even have a fucking heart attack when you find out you can't do dick about it.... BTW , we're going to elect Obama again in 2012 !... You might as well go ahead and off yourself now you miserable fucks..." A transcript of what would be known as the Battle of the Keyboard Warriors Over the Creepy Obama-flag Picture