Starbuckle

"This is the real harm, in terms of financial damages, that I suffered from Wendy's plagiarism. I can no longer use seven years of my work in an attempt to write my own book in my own way." Why not? You may have explained this, but it seems to me you could do a book with a preface explaining the situation, present the material the way you want to, and let the chips fall where they may. Is Brendy going to sue for your plagiarizing of the plagiarism of your work? Even if no publisher would touch the book, avenues for self-publication have multiplied in recent years. You would make money.

GHS writes: "Fortunately, this troll is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. Teacher, my ass. He couldn't teach a bear to shit in the woods. And he is a coward to boot." Guess what: bears already know how to shit in the woods. So is this the level of "non-contradiction" we can expect from Smith? No wonder McElroy plagiarized him. He left her no choice.

"Obviously you did not read anything else." I read the Slate article, in addition to, earlier in my life, some Aristotle, Plato and Jane Austen. Now I have two questions. 1) Why would you assume that anyone who undertakes a long commute must be crazy? 2) Why would you assume that anyone who asked you that question "obviously" could not have read the linked article?

And what's next? Will "Smith" claim to be the author of The Obvious Parallels?

Well, I think Bertroll Rustic has proved that the very citation of relevant evidence proves that the evidence is irrelevant. That is just elementary logicks 101. What moore is required to show that George H. Smith--if that's his real name--indeed fabricated his own speakings and writings, planting the "evidence" years in advance just to fake-substantiate the fact of Wendy McElroy's plagiarism (probably using the time machine for which photographic evidence was presented in another thread)? Let Smith (Jones?) admit at last that his creations have all been concoctions from the get-go, the mere confections of his own mind!

George, did you write A: TCAG, or was it Wendy? BE HONEST.

K seems not to remember his own post. Why would anybody "explain" that "There's nothing wrong with making personal choices about what to see or not" unless he were assuming that the person he were "explaining" it to might not understand it? Such pronunciamentalizing is condescending. >>Was Mike implying that he doubted whether he is morally entitled to decide what movies to see and not to see? >>There's nothing wrong with making personal choices about what to see or not.Starbuckle, >>I don't know. You have to ask him. >>Is anybody making a moral judgment about entitlement other than you? Michael<<

In addition to your proposed higher-price copy of evidence, it seems to me that you could collate much of your electronically extant evidence and analysis, publish it as an e-book on Amazon for $4.99 or $2.99 (or $.99, for widest distribution but lower-percentage royalties; about a third of payments versus about two thirds), and then add a note to the review comment at the Amazon page for "Wendy's" book saying: "Hey, I've just published an e-book elaborating the evidence for my accusation of plagiarism, entitled xyz, available right here on Amazon." You could put it together quickly just by collating emails in this thread, cutting a few obvious overlaps, and perhaps adding a few other items. Creating a clean Amazon Kindle doc from an MS Word doc and uploading it to a self-publishing account at Amazon.com requires only a few hours of work. (The widgets in the WordStar letter might not be easily reproducable.)

"There's nothing wrong with making personal choices about what to see or not." Was Mike implying that he doubted whether he is morally entitled to decide what movies to see and not to see?

Campbell writes: "In each case, Rand obviously knew Peikoff's formulations and endorsed them (or, in the third case, left room for them), but (contrary to Peikoff's own statements, in the introduction to OPAR and elsewhere) I don't think she originated any of them." RC is mistaken, I think, about one of his examples, that of "contextual certainty," which is certainly integral to Rand's epistemology. Perhaps he is referring to some aspect of Peikoff's formulation. Barbara Branden, like others, goes overboard in criticizing Peikoff's OPAR. Despite any deficiencies rhetorical or logical, it offers very valuable arguments and explanation, and it can't be dismissed as a "paralyzingly boring" rehash of Rand. When it came out, I read it with devouring interest, and by then knew Rand's work pretty well. Criticisms of the writing ability of authors whose stance or style rubs the reader the wrong way often tend to be too sweeping, judging by what I see posted on discussion boards and Amazon.

See Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King.

If the brief and discontinuous excerpts on the Old Nick's web site are indicative of the book's writing, the superlatives from Hospers, Schoolland and others are puzzling.

There is no reason to be against "Feelings." First, reason and emotion are not necessarily antagonistic. Second, it was sung ten times in a row on the old "Gong Show."

Baker wrote: "In my humble opinion, if you spend more than half an hour going to your job one way, you are crazy." Why?

Hmmm... so according to Greybird's philosophy, one can't have a philosophy? Velly intellesting....

BC's oft-repeated, never-argued-for philosophical assumption that philosophical assumptions are irrelevant to scientific understanding of the world is false. Suppose two theories of particle physics each make the same set of confirmed predictions, but one of the theories incorporates a nonsensical-seeming notion about how reality "works" to "explain" quantum-level phenomena while the other theory avoids that problematic notion. The two theories contradict each other with respect to their basic understanding of the basic nature of the universe. We might have warrant for saying that both theories are false (at least in some respect), or that a determination about which is true and which is false cannot yet be made. But we cannot say either that both theories are true or that the truth or falsehood of the theories--theories the content of which partly hinges on the disputed notion--is _irrelevant_ to our understanding of the nature of physical reality. After all, these notion-informed theories are _about_ the nature of physical reality. BC may take his metaphysical and epistemological assumptions about the nature of scientific work so entirely for granted that he does not regard those assumptions as being philosophical at all; but just because he believes he has sidestepped foundational questions doesn't mean that he has.

What a pack of hyenas.

Laissez Faire Books did not have Roy's Liberty Against Power for a while, but apparently they've had it in stock at least since January of 2011. http://www.lfb.org/product_info.php?cPath=27&products_id=918

Thank you, George. I bought a copy of your book in the early 80s and gave it to a religious friend of mine who, so far as I can tell from statements of his on the web and the publicity for a movie he recently produced about the Scopes trial, was altogether uninfluenced by it. If you were revising the book today, would you change any of its major judgments or conclusions?

Wales, an anarchist? Where does that one come from?

The Watch's anti-ARI screed includes a few sideways jabs at "neoconservative," "fascist" foreign policy without any explanation of what the disagreements are. The smear tactics detract considerably from the piece, the mainline argument of which pertains not to ideological views of ARI writers but to the institute's internal politics. The Raimondoan approach to polemics is not consonant with rational persuasion.

Hyperlinks don't auto-click.

I came across an interesting discussion of perceptual blindness and conceptual blindness on a radio show called "Fast Track" with Steve Dorn. The audio is here: http://bit.ly/gElAhK It's about how the mind often fills in the blanks when one has perceived only scattered and incomplete information. Sometimes one's expectations about what the missing bits would add up to are accurate, sometimes not. The guest notes that many persons who regard themselves as "well-trained observers" aren't that well-trained. They do a lot of blank-filling like everybody else, and believe they've observed what they're only supposing they've observed. I bring the topic up in this thread because it has been my contention that Schulman prepped himself mentally for quite a long time for his God-experience time. The physical deprivation that triggered his funky state of consciousness (the Nimoyesque "mind-meld" with God) was only a proximate cause. Much of Schulman's argument in this thread amounts to strenuous blank-filling that serves to render his experience intelligible in theistic terms (as well as pseudo-rationalistic and science-fictional terms). If all the assumptions and leaps of faith and logic and strained analogies and so forth were stripped away, the only thing Schulman could claim to have "perceived" during the eight hours would be the effects on his consciousness of a bad trip.

http://milesmathis.com/entang.html "The fairly obvious answer is that their first postulate was wrong. They assumed that there was no reality under the probability numbers, but entanglement showed that there was. Just look at the Wiki quote again: the whole problem is between their postulate and the outcome of the experiment. Faced with a contrary experimental outcome, a sensible person would admit his postulate was wrong, but that is not the way of modern physics. Physicists cannot admit they were wrong. So, in order to keep their postulate, they stoop to this force-at-a-distance magic."

"I don't see the point of giving this thread a title worthy of Lindsay Perigo." I don't see the point of comparing me to the likes of Perigo. I think anarchism is delusional to begin with, and that Rothbard's attempt to paper over the nature of the mafia is also delusional.