Michelle

Isn't that equivalent to saying that the first big problem you run into will break you?

It's lovely out on the deck tonight. The sky is awash with stars.

Those damned imperialist warmongerers! I don't think the US should act like the world's policeman, but this isolationist stance is absurd. We can and should liberate people from tyranny. In the case of this article, I am offended by the author's conviction that we should walk on eggshells because the subhuman Osama Bin Laden is again threatening America. Let's find this guy and kill him. The article actually sounds similar to On the Justice of Roosting Chickens by Ward Churchill. Same idea: shame on America for upsetting these poor people. We sure got what we deserved. Of course, the ARI position of 'Kill em all and let the god that doesn't exist sort em out' is equally bad.

How is accepting the demands of some cave-dwelling degenerate going to help us? Although the European nations are just letting them run hog wild. My complaint is more aimed at them than the United States. My comment shouldn't be misconstrued. I don't approve of the mentality which treats any middle-easterner or muslim as a terrorist. It's awful in the South. Here in Tennessee, for instance, near the Eastern side, there's a middle-eastern gas station owner who is going out of business because most of the local population refuses to do business with him. They'll actually drive a few extra miles to patronize the gas station owned by a white guy. This man is a decent, respectable, law-abiding man who just happens to be middle-eastern in descent, and he suffers for it. That kind of paranoid mentality was probably also responsible for things like the Japanese-American internment and the HUAC. So many governments are afraid of offending their Muslim populations, though, that they refuse to crack down on known radical groups.

Sad, sad, sad. I always wondered how the Rearden trial in AS would play out in real life. It sounds like the kid tried something like what Rearden did. There are too many Objectivists who make life needlessly difficult for themselves by trying to play the tall, dark, and silent Howard Roark kind of role. What usually ends up happening is that their clients/employers tell them where they can shove their pissy attitudes, and they end up driving loved ones away from them and generally ruin their own lives. Applying Objectivist principles can liberate a person and open the door of life to him. But making a cult out of it can also ruin his life. The fundamentally ironic thing is how Objectivism attracts people with low self-esteem who think that if they ape Rand's heroes that they'll magically discover self-esteem as well. Didn't Nathaniel Branden write some books on developing self-esteem? Are they effective?

I'm sick and tired of seeing governments bend over backward to avoid offending these Muslim savages who think rioting and looting is an appropriate response to a snarky cartoon making fun of their prophet. Christians don't raise hell every time someone ridicules their prophet. The worst thing coming out of the Christian community is these pro-life abortion-clinic-bombing nutjobs. Buddhists only kill themselves in protest. Do you hear about mass rioting among Jews whenever some white nationalist asshole talks about exterminating them? I don't recall the last time a Christian leader called for the head of Salmon Rushdie. I'm pretty sure he remembers that some Muslim asshole did, though. These people are a national risk and we need to keep them under control.

Heh. I thought the film version of The Fountainhead was awful (take, for instance, the fact that the first 200 or so pages of the book are roughly explained away in five minutes in an opening sequence so condensed and baffling that even I was having a hard time following it, and I'd just finished the damned novel for the second time), but her complaints are more with the plot, almost all of which could be applied to the novel (although Wynand doesn't kill himself in the novel). At least the film version didn't really include the rape scene. Can you imagine how much more squawking (to use a word she applied to Rand) she'd have done if it had been included? "He's found innocent, and the jury and the whole courtroom erupts into applause at this horrific miscarriage of justice. He has admitted committing the crime on the stand. His defense was that he has way better taste than the pigs who paid for it, so he should be able to blow it up. The jury buys this idiocy. The movie paints him as a hero." This does touch on a problem I had with the novel, though (putting aside the rape, which is less disturbing still than Rand's justification of it, and seemed to amount to nothing more than a verbose way of saying 'she was asking for it'). While Roark could have sought legal action against Keating for the way his building ended up, there was nothing that justified him legally in blowing up Cortlandt. In Rand's use of the courtroom as a philosophical court, she neglected, I believe, the fact that Roark was being tried for violating the laws of a society. Plenty of people believe that their use of violence and destruction is philosophically appropriate, but even if they were right, this would not afford them protection from laws they violated in the process.

Oh good! Making notes in books is such a popular thing now, but I have never been able to bring myself to scribble up my books. I love my books. It feels sacrilegious to even think about marring them with sharp lines of ink or dusty pencil marks. Even worse, though, is when people highlight passages with a gaudy yellow highlighter. Why not just use a post-it to mark a passage or page you like in a book? And that way you don't ruin it for other people.

Ginny, I do that in my head. I actually did that earlier today in something I was reading. The word the author used was awkward, so I just mentally replaced it with a more suitable one and went merrily reading on.

Thanks. You want a real hoot? Check out The Postmodernism Generator. It randomly generates fully-formed postmodern essays, complete with full bibliographies! Every time you refresh the page you get a new one. The joke is that such essays are so incoherent that they can be randomly generated and still be as valid and insightful as ones which are actually written by these hacks. The Postmodernism Generator gets a mention in the Dawkins article, but I'm pretty sure the link in that article is too old to work.

You're dropping the ball too quickly and conceding to cultural relativism. Just because the Western tradition has a very individualistic ethos and the Eastern tradition a very collectivistic ethos and both are rather settled on these does not mean that they're of equal value or are equally justifiable. Of course, you're not likely to get anywhere with a tradition defined by arationalism and traditionalism. Reality does not lie, however, and by looking at the results of these traditions you can get some idea of how healthy they are. Consider the anti-individualistic East, and then observe how most of the countries falling under this tradition have never known freedom because any political change was always one Attila wrestling another Attila out of the throne. Freedom and peace are generally scarce in the East, and most of the freedom there today is a direct result of Western influence and intervention. There is no such thing as postmodernism. There is only a void left by the death of rationality. In the context of this void, you get whim-worship, a lack of originality ("postmodernists" tend to assert that originality is no longer possible and that we can only achieve anything of significance by imitation and plagiarism), a lack of profundity, a lack of passion, etc. In architecture you get bizarre, ill-conceived, haphazard crap which has 'liberated itself from the totalitarian tendencies of Modernist architecture.' In literature you get characters with no drive or worth, plot with no motion or purpose, writing with no semblance of coherence, and 'timeless themes' because everything is just culturally bound. In philosophy you get stuff that is all gloss and no substance and uses bizarre syntax to confuse people and hide the lack of a point. I think that wiki article mentions Alan Sokal's practical joke on some of these hucksters. The guy is a physicist and wrote some deliberately absurd essay which makes no sense whatsoever and submitted it to a postmodernist magazine to see if it would be accepted. It was. You should read the paper some time. It's a hoot. For anyone who wants an indication of how bad this can get, Richard Dawkins wrote a hilarious essay on it: http://richarddawkins.net/article,824,Post...-Dawkins-Nature

I thought 'supply-side Jesus' was pretty clever.

The greatest thing in the world is when you mull over some sentence that has been bothering you (perhaps it is perfect grammatically, but something just doesn't seem right about it) and, after changing a few words to more precisely relate your exact meaning and messing around with punctuation marks and word order, something about it just seems to click, and it suddenly pops. And then you might have to exclude this baby of yours from the finished product in the name of structural integrity. A decent writer must be either thick-skinned or cold-blooded. Any girlie with a diary and a pen can mother any number of precious little babes, but a serious writer who wants to improve her prose and get published realizes that she has to murder her little darlings if they don't fit in with their peers. So you must either be able to tolerate the pain of doing this or not be affected by the process at all.

Well, so we agree that the evidence matters. But I still argue that we have plenty of evidence that a mother and a father in the house is preferable. (Excluding ho junkies.) I want the evidence, and not the desire of men for fashion accessories, to be the driving force in our eventually approving homosexual male couples routinely as if they were no different from heterosexual couples in marriage. And you do grant that the legalization of "gay marriage" will lead to that by judicial activism, I believe. I don't think we have more to debate on this. But I invoke nature in all arguments about human nature. You have to be more specific in your objection. II don't think you read the entire quote very closely, did you? You said: "And you do grant that the legalization of "gay marriage" will lead to that by judicial activism, I believe." It might. Slippery slopes don't make for good arguments, though. There is a clear difference between using the word nature to mean 'the essential and defining qualities of something' (e.g when speaking of human nature) and using the same word to mean the physical and natural world around us (the only thing you could have meant by your comment, and what I objected to). I think I was very clear in my objection, anyhow: "The only thing nature demonstrates is that certain natural processes are required for women to grow and deliver children. Anything else is just you projecting your biases onto nature." You're right, I didn't read it very closely. Clever. And I don't use the word nature in human nature to mean essence. I use it to mean typical or particular phenotype. Elaborate. For example, I happen to prefer the tast of vanilla to chocolate, and I like fatty foods but not sweets. That's my particular nature, my make up. It's certainly not in any way my essence. Fine. But that is not the sense in which the phrase 'human nature' is used by others. Moreover, if you don't mean 'defining characteristics' by the word nature, and you clearly are not speaking of physical nature around you, why even use the word 'nature?' "Inborn or hereditary characteristsics as an influence on or determinant of personality" - American Heritage. Seems a perfect fit. Ah, I see. Your preferring the taste of vanilla to chocolate is 'inborn or hereditary.'

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. ~Sinclair Lewis That's about where I'm at.

Well, so we agree that the evidence matters. But I still argue that we have plenty of evidence that a mother and a father in the house is preferable. (Excluding ho junkies.) I want the evidence, and not the desire of men for fashion accessories, to be the driving force in our eventually approving homosexual male couples routinely as if they were no different from heterosexual couples in marriage. And you do grant that the legalization of "gay marriage" will lead to that by judicial activism, I believe. I don't think we have more to debate on this. But I invoke nature in all arguments about human nature. You have to be more specific in your objection. II don't think you read the entire quote very closely, did you? You said: "And you do grant that the legalization of "gay marriage" will lead to that by judicial activism, I believe." It might. Slippery slopes don't make for good arguments, though. There is a clear difference between using the word nature to mean 'the essential and defining qualities of something' (e.g when speaking of human nature) and using the same word to mean the physical and natural world around us (the only thing you could have meant by your comment, and what I objected to). I think I was very clear in my objection, anyhow: "The only thing nature demonstrates is that certain natural processes are required for women to grow and deliver children. Anything else is just you projecting your biases onto nature." You're right, I didn't read it very closely. Clever. And I don't use the word nature in human nature to mean essence. I use it to mean typical or particular phenotype. Elaborate. For example, I happen to prefer the tast of vanilla to chocolate, and I like fatty foods but not sweets. That's my particular nature, my make up. It's certainly not in any way my essence. Fine. But that is not the sense in which the phrase 'human nature' is used by others. Moreover, if you don't mean 'defining characteristics' by the word nature, and you clearly are not speaking of physical nature around you, why even use the word 'nature?'

Gender correlation between what? I don't know that it explains anything, or that I believe it, but I have read repeatedly that liking Dr. Who, Tolkien, and Monty Python is a "guy thing." Could just as well be an Anglophile thing. I happen to be a huge fan of all three. I don't know. I thought Life of Brian was a cute movie. Can't say I liked the other movies or the TV show, though. As for Dr. Who, I never watched it. Either way, though, it has nothing to do with gender. I know women who love Tolkien and Monty Python. I know men who hate the same things. Those people you read are full of it. The only thing that made me wonder if there were something to the claim was that all the female Tolkien fans I knew in college were wiccan lesbian Kate Bush fans. Oh god, this pagan religion revival thing makes me nauseous. Watch it, you're talking to a Born-Again Celt. Cute.

Don't get you started?

If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, acts like a duck... (God, the quips that are gushing through my mind! But I will be a good boy...) Michael I REMEMBER THIS ARTICLE!

Gender correlation between what? I don't know that it explains anything, or that I believe it, but I have read repeatedly that liking Dr. Who, Tolkien, and Monty Python is a "guy thing." Could just as well be an Anglophile thing. I happen to be a huge fan of all three. I don't know. I thought Life of Brian was a cute movie. Can't say I liked the other movies or the TV show, though. As for Dr. Who, I never watched it. Either way, though, it has nothing to do with gender. I know women who love Tolkien and Monty Python. I know men who hate the same things. Those people you read are full of it. The only thing that made me wonder if there were something to the claim was that all the female Tolkien fans I knew in college were wiccan lesbian Kate Bush fans. Oh god, this pagan religion revival thing makes me nauseous.

Read the book. No adaptation has anything on it.

Gender correlation between what? I don't know that it explains anything, or that I believe it, but I have read repeatedly that liking Dr. Who, Tolkien, and Monty Python is a "guy thing." Could just as well be an Anglophile thing. I happen to be a huge fan of all three. I don't know. I thought Life of Brian was a cute movie. Can't say I liked the other movies or the TV show, though. As for Dr. Who, I never watched it. Either way, though, it has nothing to do with gender. I know women who love Tolkien and Monty Python. I know men who hate the same things. Those people you read are full of it.

That was my problem with her books on writing. She constantly uses passages from her novels and essays as examples. EDIT: I'm aware they were edited together from lecture transcripts, but the objection stands. She oughtn't be using her own writing to make her point.

Coulter's article on rebuilding the WTC is fantastic: "The attack on the World Trade Center ripped America's soul not only for the thousands of lives it snuffed out. Even if the towers had been empty, the destruction of those buildings would have been heart-wrenching. Skyscrapers are the hallmark of civilization, monuments to human brilliance and creativity. ... Whatever goes up on that site ought to be even bigger than the buildings the savages destroyed. ... The most fitting memorial to the victims of the World Trade Center attack is to build the world's most breathtaking skyscraper in the world..."

Gender correlation between what?