Starbuckle

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.

Following is the text of a recent email about anarchism. I'm tired of the anarchism-v.-minarchism wars, so not inclined to debate any criticisms of my little piece. I post it mainly because Rothbard's defense of the Mafia as portrayed in the "Godfather" is new to me and quite interesting. Perhaps others will find it so too. * * * I agree that the issue of anarchism versus limited government is somewhat academic given how far present-day governments exceed any libertarian's ideal. But some anarchists take such a nihilistic and cynical view of government and anybody in government that it does affect their analysis of current issues and whether and how reform can be undertaken. The differing approaches can sometimes be seen in the opposing sensibilities of Mises Institute or LewRockwell.com writers who tend to be anarchistic and Cato Institute writers. Anarchism isn't about just restructuring government into cantons or reinvigorating federalism or radically downsizing government. It's about junking government altogether; being able to secede/opt out of any government's authority and "compete" by patronizing another "defense agency" or by developing one's own, all within the same geographic area. This applies as much to courts and codes of justice as it does to hiring security guards, which of course anybody can do under the present system. The anarchists say that government per se constitutes an immoral violation of rights, an unjustified monopoly on the use of force. Rand pointed out that civil war is an example of anarchism in action, of competing views of justice and the proper use of force. It is not an ideal social circumstance. Rothbard and other anarchists reply that it would be "in the interest" of defense agencies in a full market economy to submit themselves to arbitration in the case of certain fundamental conflicts. But the values of individuals and their notions of their fundamental interest often clash. This isn't going to change any time in the next million years or so. There is no way to get around the fact that the coercive punishment and restraint of a person who doesn't want to be punished and restrained constitutes a "monopolistic" use of force against that person. If I'm a criminal in the view of some defense agency, I and my lawyer and my gang probably want to say that we decline to patronize the defense agency that captured me and plans to jail me. If I'm the guy caught and being prosecuted, may I "secede" from the final ruling of the arbitration if I disagree with it? If I "compete" by shooting at my captors and the bailiffs, is that a legitimate and welcome exercise of market competition in force from the anarchist perspective, or not? If it's not, it means that the function of government cannot be treated as if competition in its delivery may appropriately be allowed at every level, including the level of determining what is the notion of justice that a government may enforce and what defines a crime. There can be competition and delegation with respect to many aspects of governance, but only so long as there is some means of final arbitration to resolve otherwise irresolvable disputes. I used to think that the "justice"-dealing of an outfit like the Mafia was a good counterexample to anarchist assumptions. But then, not long ago, I came across Rothbard's review of mob movies, in which he declared that "The Godfather" was not really about the moral downfall of Michael Corleone, as "the left" would have it, but a wonderful dramatization of the effective protection agency and system of justice the Corleones have got going. To make his case, Rothbard has to ignore a number of key scenes in the movie, including the famous early one in which a movie producer wakes up to that severed horse's head. http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard114.html This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm * * * Robert Bidinotto wrote a series of articles critiquing anarchism in the process of debating a couple anarchists, and I agree pretty much with his take. I don't know if the later essays are available on the net. They were at one time housed at his Journalspace blog, now defunct; Journalspace blew up a few years back. This is from the mid-90s: http://mol.redbarn.org/objectivism/writing/RobertBidinotto/ContradictionInAnarchism.html

Xray says: "For atheists too can fall into the trap of the 'Ontological Argument' when they want to disprove any existence of a god by criticizing the traits of God as contradictory and then conclude God cannot exist. Just as the theist (using the Ontological Argument) imagines God as a perfect being and concludes (which is a thinking error) that this being must exist - doesn't the atheist operating from the other side of the fence, when he points out that God is presented as a contradictory being in the various religious texts, and from that concludes this being cannot exist, make the same thinking error?" What "thinking error" is that? Thinking based on acceptance of the fact that contradictions can't exist in reality? The axiom that metaphysical contradictions can't exist is just a restatement of the law of identity. Without implicitly recognizing that all entities are bounded by their own nature, i.e., that things are what they are and only that, no intelligible thinking can be done at all. If a person asserts both that "x is true" and "x is not true," one is thinking clearly to conclude that both statements cannot be true, that only one at most can be true. If a person states, explicitly or even unbeknownst to himself, that a posited super-being both has attribute X and does not have attribute X, one is thinking clearly to conclude that such a being cannot exist. Gods are always presented as being outside the natural realm and unbounded by the considerations of cause and effect that circumscribe and inhibit mere natural entities. Of course, theists like to pretend that logic and reality are irrelevant to assessing their mystical presumptions and experiences. And, of course, they also insist on the validity of the law of identity when it suits them and drop it like a hot potato when it doesn't suit them. They are happy to make use of the benefits of coherence for the sake of cosseting and camouflaging the stretches of incoherence they want to indulge in. Neil, being more aware than other theists of the obvious metaphysical objection to his posited natural-realm-transcending entity, contends that his uber-being does not suffer from any of these self-contradictions. But if one presses him on the matter, one will learn that "Well, you really had to be there!" One can learn nothing, for example, about how it is possible for the Neil-God to be "everlasting" or purely spiritual in form; or how Neil knows these features of Neil-God; you really had to be there and partake of the invisible mystic communion yourself to get any inkling. Such mysteries are incommunicable. It all comes down to a Jerry-Lewis version of epistemology: "For those who understand, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't, none will do." Another commentator averred somewhere in this thread that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This statement is too compact. It would be more precise to say that absence of persistent and observable evidence is not evidence of absence of what that evidence, had it remained available, would have shown. If a corpse has been effectively hidden and all traces of murder expunged, this doesn't mean that you now have evidence that no murder was or could have been committed; true enough. Perhaps you must remain in a state of agnosticism and speculation about the fate of a missing person who has in fact been murdered. On the other hand, the primary evidence we have of any entity and what it can do or has done is not the traces that it leaves in reality, but the acting entity itself. Had you been around at the time of the murder, you certainly could have observed the murderer committing murder. If the murderer had then failed to detect you but wiped away all other evidence, evidence of murder would have persisted in the form of your memory of having directly observed the murder. Another person hidden with you in the room could have witnessed the same event too. Suppose there had been three persons hidden in the room. Then all three would have seen it. Suppose there had been a hundred persons in the room, all with decent vantage points. Then all hundred would have seen it. Gods, however, are among those peculiar kinds of entities which cannot be observed either directly or indirectly, anyway, anyhow, when they're "there" and when they're not there, except insofar as allegedly manifested in dream, delusion, imagination or hallucination. Even specks of dust are more metaphysically potent than that.

Gaede wrote: "If you liked O or not--I never watched him except once and he stunk--it's all garbage. This country is of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations." What does this statement even mean? I weary of sweeping, perfervid, apparently straight-faced ideological declarations that, taken literally, have no intelligible relationship to reality. Pretending to be comprehensive and exhaustive, they imply the nonexistence of all other relevant cultural, social and political facts. They convey nothing and illuminate nothing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/new-rules-for-writers_b_808558.html "No great writer ever wrote for the audience at hand. And if you can't know your audience when you create, that's almost the same as saying that there is no audience at all. Is the audience your inner critic? You should have silenced that voice before you ever started writing. Criticism is for others, not for your own work. Your own work flows from passion and madness, not theories of completion and harmony and perfection. Is the audience a super-intelligent one, as well-read as you, as biographically diverse and adventurous as you, as restless for newness and experiment and reality as you? You should have killed that audience before you started writing, because why write for someone just like you? Where's the excitement in that? "Is your audience the future? Is it the past? Is it the pantheon of writing gods, with vast legions of devotees at their feet? How can any of these be true, when you don't know the first thing about the art of writing? You will be a beginner until the day you die, you will have mastered nothing, you will be vanishing into nothingness without the most basic grasp on technique and manipulation. You write for no audience. You don't even write for yourself, you don't write for anything outside the bounds of the story you're putting on the page, to make sense to itself and only its compulsions. The rest will take care of itself."

In my view, it was mandatory to vote to repeal Obamacare. I also believe that the debt limit should not be raised. Keer's complaint might be R.'s, but then again it might not. R. seems so cynical, so world-weary, so bored with and contemptuous of all others who fail to carbon-copy his own worldview, that he often cannot be bothered to condescend to state exactly what his critical comment vis-a-vis anything might be. We are informed that there is stupidity in the universe. Okay. So what particular stupidity is he complaining about in this instance? Obamacare? The "symbolic" vote to repeal it that may turn out to have been the first step, sooner or later, in its repeal? The characterization of the repeal as bipartisan? All? None? Other? Some combination of forty conceivable possibilities? If this were a lone instance or R.'s hyper-cryptic hit-and-run contempt I might say, "Okay, maybe R. was just looking for a place to stick this quote about stupidity that he likes." But there are too many other cases in which R. pretends to be so lordly and above-it-all that he cannot be troubled even to state what the target of some hyper-elliptical "devastating" remark might be. This is defeatism, not wit or insight. It does not go very far to establish his cosmically infinite superiority over all mortals who might take issue with him on any question.

"To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous fortune; Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: To die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to? 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep To sleep, perchance to dream; Aye, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There's the respect That makes calamity of so long life: For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time, The Oppressor's wrong, the proud man's Contumely, The pangs of disprized love, the Law's delay, The insolence of Office, and the Spurns That patient merit of th' unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would there fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered Countrey from whose Bourne No traveller returns..." --Shakespeare