Starbuckle

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

At the beginning of this thread, there was a question about whether OL's Adam Selene was the same man as an Adam Selene in NJ, also known as Adam Cappellazzi, who was "charged with forging the signatures of two Queens Supreme Court Justices on the purported divorce papers of two separate couples. He was arrested today during a sting operation in which an investigator posed as a person seeking his services to help mediate his divorce." The question was raised in this thread because the OL Selene stopped posting on the same day that the Cappellazzi-Selene, of Hillside, NJ, was arrested; and because an Adam Selene who belonged to an NYC Objectivist Club listed his town as Hillside, NJ, according to Brant in post #2. What I wanted to know, then, was not whether there have been other uses of the word "Selene" in world history, but whether the OL Adam Selene is the same Adam Selene who was arrested, and if so, whether he denies the charges.

So did this Adam Selene turn out to be a different one from the one posting at OL?

Try again.

How is it an act of cowardice to announce that one will not run again for public office?

http://www.wendymcelroy.com/plugins/content/content.php?content.30 Book review of James Valiants' The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics: The Case Against the Brandens on Monday 05 May 2008 by Wendy McElroy author list in Ayn Rand and Objectivism For the first time, I find it necessary to comment on a book's reviews-to-date before offering my own critique of it. The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics (Durban House Publishing, $27.95) by James S. Valliant has been blasted by its own passionate critics in both formal reviews and online discussions. The book's provocative subtitle, The Case Against the Brandens (Nathaniel and Barbara Branden), almost guarantees that admirers of those two popular writers will assume a defensive stance. But the response has been more than defensive; it has verged on questioning the Valliant book's right to exist. Certainly, the subject matter is distasteful. Valliant's The Passion chronicles three views of the same event and of its sad fallout: namely, Nathaniel Branden's long-term affair (1954–1968) with Ayn Rand. The fall-out was nothing less than the bitter cleaving in half of the Objectivist movement; it is a schism that survives to this day. The much-discussed affair was first explored in print from Barbara Branden's perspective in her biography of Rand, The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), which became a Showtime movie of the same title in 1999. Nathaniel Branden's point-of-view was aired in his memoir Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand (1989), which issued in revised form as My Years With Ayn Rand in 1999. Rand, who died in 1982, never publicly offered her viewpoint but rumors have circulated of personal journals that discussed "the affair." Such discussion was absent, however, from the posthumously published Journals of Ayn Rand (1997). Consequently, what was known of "the affair" emerged almost entirely from two people Rand had ostracized, and whose involvement in "the affair" makes the very possibility of their objectivity questionable. This is not an accusation of dishonesty but a comment on human nature. It is natural to remember a complex, painful series of events in a manner most favorable to yourself, especially in the face of being denounced over that event. People have more sympathy toward their own motives and suffering than toward that of others. Moreover, since the accounts occurred after Rand's death, any first-person rebuttal was precluded. Until now, that is, with Rand's voice emerging through never-before-published excerpts from her personal journals. The Passion is divided into two parts: Valliant's defense of Rand or, as some would phrase it, his attack on the Brandens; and, excerpts from Rand's personal journals which are narrated by Valliant. Both parts have drawn sharp criticism. I address the criticisms revolving around Rand's journal excerpts because they are the most basic ones. Those criticisms call into question the right or propriety of The Passion to exist. Some of the voices questioning The Passion's propriety are not hostile. For example, the renowned Rand scholar Chris Sciabarra voiced an understandable embarrassment at reading Rand's most private thoughts, which he did not believe she meant to become public. The crux of this objection: rather than constituting a defense of Rand, the publication of her private journals is a violation of her privacy. I disagree. People may keep journals for intimately private reasons. For example, to vent painful emotions and, so, ease them or to clarify confusion by expressing it. But people do not preserve and bequeath journals to an executor in order to preserve privacy. Rand may have intended to destroy the more personal journals and, somehow, neglected to do so. But this explanation seems implausible. Rand was not careless, especially regarding her writing or intellectual legacy. She was meticulous; Rand once claimed that every word of Atlas Shrugged was le mot juste – a result of conscious and careful selection. She then proceeded to defend the use of 'this' adjective rather than 'that' one in a sentence that had been randomly pointed out to her. Rand also defended her intellectual legacy with fierce tenacity. Those who organized "Objectivist" groups were expected to request permission before using that label. Nor could Rand – a best-selling author and nexus of controversy – be unaware of the posthumous interest that would surround her papers, especially ones dealing with "the affair." If Rand preserved those intimate journal entries and assigned all rights to her executor (Leonard Peikoff), then it is only reasonable to assume that she wanted them published or, at least, she wanted that option to be available at Peikoff's discretion. The question now becomes: did Rand's estate exercise that option in an appropriate manner? I believe it did, and my reasons are threefold. First: the breadth and persistence of the rumors ensures that the subject will not disappear. For over three decades, snicker-inspiring details of "the affair" have circulated widely and without abatement. Critics of Rand typically turn any conversation about her philosophy or achievements – whether it occurs at a dinner table or at an academic conference – into an analysis of her allegedly "twisted" psychology. Their demeaning comments are based in large measure on the information and interpretation provided by the two Branden biographies. Through their eyes, Rand becomes a pathetic and deluded older woman whose self-declared rationalism cannot withstand being jilted by a much younger man. She becomes a callous, aging wife who forces her devoted husband to tolerate an affair that may have driven him to alcoholism. In his Introduction to The Passion, Valliant pushes this phenomenon into the forefront as an explanation of why he believes a defense of Rand and "the affair" is necessary. He writes, "Of greater concern is the more recent trend toward personal attack against Rand in order to dismiss her ideas – and how often the philosopher's sex life is brought up in discussions of her epistemology or political theory." He continues, "The root of this trend can be traced to two persons: Nathaniel and Barbara Branden." In response to such personal attacks, Objectivists tend to distance themselves from Rand "the woman" before discussing Rand "the philosopher." Or they defensively explain that it is an ad hominem – that is, a logical fallacy – to discredit the truth of a person's statements by reference to that person's character. The statements or philosophy are true or false on their merits. Both responses acknowledge the "truth" of the Branden's accounts, however. So far the world has heard only one side of what was essentially a messy divorce in both the personal and professional sense. But the uncontradicted account of "the affair" and break up has assumed the stature of fact and the account has severely damaged Rand's intellectual legacy. To me, the real question regarding the appropriateness of releasing Rand's voice is "why did it take so long?" Second: the truth is important to those who admire Rand, especially to those who have been personally transformed through her influence. I am one of them. As such, I would like to understand an important event in my life. At 15-years-old, I became an Objectivist through reading We the Living and, then, everything I could find by Rand. Her impact on my life was profound and benevolent. At 15-years-old, I needed a role model; I needed an ideal at whom I could look up and toward whom I could climb. The one-dimensional John Galt was a poor substitute for the flesh-and-blood woman who had created a philosophy and movement out of nothing more than her passion for ideas. I first heard of "the affair" in my early twenties from a second-hand rumor passed on by a friend. Years before, someone he knew had been asked to house-sit Nathaniel Branden's house while Branden was out of town. The house-sitter grabbed the opportunity to go through Branden's personal papers and spread the details across Los Angeles, eventually, reaching me. At that point, I had already developed significant political disagreements with Rand; specifically, I was a Rothbardian and an individualist anarchist. Rand had ceased to be a desperately needed ideal and, so, the impact on me was dulled. But I've wondered how the 15-year-old I used to be would have reacted. I think the news would have been devastating. I also wonder how many other teenagers are deprived of the chance to use Rand as a role model due to accounts of "the affair."My point is not that Rand's personal life or character should be whitewashed for the greater good; truth is the greatest good. But if the facts have been presented incorrectly or in a manner that renders Rand pathetic, then I want the record corrected so that other 15-year-olds regain the opportunity to admire Rand both as a woman and as a philosopher. Third: the Objectivist movement is historically important; its record should be preserved and presented accurately in a manner that provides perspective on its development. The split up between Rand and the Brandens – in particular between Rand and Nathaniel Branden – is a pivotal development in the history of the Objectivist movement. The Nathaniel Branden Institute collapsed and left a void that has not been filled. Objectivist groups across North America dissolved into bitter schisms. For example, a friend was banned from a discussion group he had helped to form because he refused to take Nathaniel Branden's book The Psychology of Self-Esteem off his shelf. From one day to the next, his circle of friends became a circle of condemners. Even today, the '80s schism tends to define the Objectivist movement by splitting it into small "o" and capital "O" Objectivists, the latter being viewed as Rand purists who revile the Brandens. It is strange to hear Rand scholars and admirers suggest that her perspective on such a key movement event might best be left unavailable. I am hard pressed to think of similarly important material from other diaries or correspondence that historians would advocate burying. The reason offered for this suggestion: admirers wish to spare Rand embarrassment. That reason is commendable but invalid on several grounds. Not to be crude, but Rand is dead and incapable of being embarrassed. The only impact could be on her legacy and that has been as badly damaged by the Brandens' books. Strangely, however, I have not heard people object to how embarrassing it was for Rand to have both those accounts available. Moreover, I found her journal entries to be far from embarrassing. In fact, I was relieved by both their content and their tone. Far from the rantings and ravings of a scorned lover, I discovered the soul-searching of a confused woman who was desperate to make sense of a relationship. Rand counsels Branden for months in an attempt to help him (and one imagines herself) come to grips with what's happening. Of course, the attempt is futile as Rand is missing the information that would make sense of it all: Branden's other and ongoing affair. Having argued that The Passion is an appropriate book, it is time to ask if it is a well-written one. This brings us back to the first section of the book in which Valliant presents a full defense of Rand. The style of Valliant's defense has drawn as much fire as its content. For example, Valliant has been accused of constant repetition, of giving the benefit of all doubt to Rand and none to the Brandens, of exaggerating the Brandens' misdeeds and motives, etc. In his review of The Passion, David M. Brown of Laissez-Faire Books correctly observes of Valliant, "he's smart enough to know that this is not all the fault of one party, however much he may have focused his mind on the task of letting Rand utterly off the hook." I agree. But such criticism misses the point. Valliant's book is not a scholarly work that aims to provide a balanced view; nor does it pretend to be. Valliant's book is not written in a "popular" manner that seeks to entertain; nor does it pretend to be. The Passion is best viewed as a legal brief, with all the strengths and weaknesses inherent in that sort of document. Valliant, a real-life district attorney, has taken on Rand as a client whom he defends against the Brandens' accusations. And the best defense is an offense, with the Brandens becoming "the accused." Like a good attorney, he does not credit both sides; he does not give the opposition any benefit of the doubt. He advocates for his client. In saying this, I do not suggest that Valliant has adopted the attitude of "I stand by Rand, right or wrong." Rather, I believe he decided before conceiving the book that Rand was overwhelmingly in the right and, then, adopted a legalistic style of demonstrating his conclusion. The legalistic presentation involves several stylistic tactics. Again, no benefit of the doubt or softening of the indictment is offered to the accused. Valliant is out to get a conviction on all counts from the jury: his readership. Accordingly, he repeats the charges against the Brandens as every new piece of important evidence is revealed. More than this, he reviews the arguments to date in order to integrate each new piece of evidence into the overall argument. He drives home to the jury the pattern of the Brandens' supposed turpitude, a pattern he establishes by demonstrating how every alleged lie or deceit relates to every other one presented. Matters both small and large become threads in the pattern. For example, Valliant exposes in repetitive detail the minor and not-so-minor discrepancies that exist between the Branden's two de facto Rand biographies as well as the discrepancies between Nathaniel Branden's first and revised edition his book. Personally, I dislike The Passion's legalistic style. I do not enjoy curling up with a legal brief or a court transcript, and the book reads like one. I also think Valliant's legalistic approach damaged the credibility of his arguments as much as it strengthened them in places. Consider one of the criticisms leveled at Valliant's style: he gives the Brandens no benefit of the doubt but, instead, consistently ascribes ill motives to their actions. Thus, the discrepancies between the biographies become evidence of conscious dishonesty. This approach weakens his argument. All of us know that there are often natural discrepancies – even important ones – between two people who remember an event from their unique perspectives. Perhaps each of the Brandens does remember events in a self-serving manner; even this would not constitute dishonesty. Human memory is flawed in the best of circumstances. But this defense of the Brandens easily becomes an offense. Even if the many discrepancies between the biographies are not due to dishonesty – even if they constitute tricks of memory, a differing interpretation of events, or simple carelessness – they still call the accuracy of their portrayal of Rand into question. In short, the discrepancies introduce a reasonable doubt as to whether the biographies present Rand accurately. In its place, Valliant attempts to present a far warmer portrait of Rand as a woman of humor, charm, compassion, and loyalty to friends. But, again, I stumbled over an aspect of Valliant's approach. It was not the legalistic style but the framework of Objectivist theories of psychology, with which I am in significant disagreement. In short, I balked at much of the cognitive analysis of psychological motives which was offered by The Passion. For example, Valliant writes in analyzing Nathaniel Branden's underlying motives or psychology, "'Rationalism,' as Rand used the term, is not to be found in the standard texts – being first identified by Objectivism – and it is a relatively rare phenomenon, most common among intellectuals. Hence, the 'rationalist-repressor' is a relatively rare species of repressor." In short, Valliant's attempt to psychoanalyze the Brandens was not convincing and – given how much of the book the attempt absorbed – it constitutes a major flaw. Nevertheless, The Passion accomplishes one of the psychological goals Valliant intended. To a significant degree the book restored to me and (I believe) others a better opinion of "Rand the woman." For one thing, it was important to me that NBI, a beacon of light in the cultural darkness, had not been shattered by a pathetic aging woman who had taken a fancy to a younger man. Her actions are now understandable and no longer inexplicably vicious. Also, as a result of Valliant's arguments, I no longer accept certain previously assumed facts that had lowered my opinion of "Rand the woman." For example, I find no reason to believe Frank O'Connor was an alcoholic – a condition to which many people presumed "the affair" had driven him or made more chronic. I am pleased to have read The Passion. I intend to re-read it. And I am grateful to Valliant on several points while disagreeing with him on others.

Peikoff caught a lot of flak for opening his book on Objectivism by observing that it is addressed to human beings, not academics, but including "any academics who qualify." I suppose some academics are thin-skinned enough not to read the book in retaliation against this barb. Anyway, here's a very similar inaugural sally in Harold Fleming's 1951 title Ten Thousand Commandments, a book on antitrust laws (can be downloaded for free from Mises.org). "This book is not for lawyers, but for people. Or, if that distinction sounds unfair to my legal friends, let's say it's for laymen. The lawyers may read it if they want to. I put the citations in for them." I hope that Fleming did not have too many illegal friends.

True Objectivists do not fake reality in any manner whatsoever. They do not wear wigs to disguise their bald or balding pates, do not wear clothes or perpetrate exercise to disguise their out-of-shapeness, do not wear spectacles to pretend they are not near-sighted, do not wear contacts to pretend they don't need spectacles, etc. They do not wash lest they obscure their natural dirt and odor. They do not study grammar, logic, history, science, philosophy, literature or enunciation, or attempt to learn and grow in any way, lest they thereby dupe others about the innate inarticulateness and ignorance with which they were born. Honest, rational, objective and free practitioners of reason, freedom, objectivity and honesty do nothing but sit on the ground and suck their thumbs from the day they are born until the day they die. But they might occasionally burble fatuously inept inanities on discussion boards in fumbling dunderheaded manifestation of the One True Objective Kimmlerian Way of Being.

FWIW, and without having seen anything firsthand of how Wendy McElroy would or did respond, it seems to me that George's case that she plagiarized is unassailable, all of it taken together. I had heard nothing about the controversy before George mentioned it in the context of the PC contents he wants to sell. I Googled for more info about the controversy to the extent it was public circa 1998, but could find nothing (which doesn't mean that there aren't postings on elists on the net somewhere, just that, if so, they weren't easy for me to dig up). Much of the back and forth then was apparently in the form of private emails. I find puzzling the complaints or wondering about why George would raise the issue again after so many years, as if it were some great mystery. If the facts adduced are correct, a pretty horrific injustice was done to him; words are all a professional writer has. Should there be some statute of limitations on wanting such an injustice to be rectified? It looks like George could just go ahead and publish his own work based on his lectures, and let Wendy sue him on the basis of his plagiarizing of her. If she is mute because unable to make an intelligible case in light of all many contradictory previous statements on the matter, would she have any motive go to court over George's publishing of his own work? I'm just tossing this out there as a possibility, not saying that that this is what George should do.

JNS quotes Robert Heinlein: "On the other hand, Neil, there are many things--practically all of the important questions of philosophy--are not subject to final answers purely by reason. In my opinion, they are not subject to final answers simply by reason. This has been gone into a considerable extent by philosophers in the past, and there's even a term--a technical term--for that called 'noumena' as opposed to 'phenomena.' Phenomena are things that you can grasp through your physical senses or through measurements made with your physical senses through instruments and so forth and so in other words, phenomena are things that we can know about the physical universe. Noumena translates as the unknowable things. The unknowable things: What is the purpose of the universe?..." Neil's lengthy interview with Heinlein is very effective and interesting. Neil knew how to draw out Heinlein about very fundamental issues. So Heinlein had Kantian leanings. And apparently these provide retroactive moral support for Neil's own going off the epistemological rails. But Heinlein supports his claim about our alleged inability to determine what things are "in themselves" (because our means of knowing things, our senses, allegedly distort the "true" nature of things by committing the sin of being a specific means of awareness) by reference to our inability to determine the merely (and wrongly) imputed purposes of non-choosing entities (like "the universe") and to the fact that we're not omniscient, including about the wherefores of things. I would counter: if we can't find "final" answers to a particular question by means of reason, we can't find them by any other means either. But so what? In order to get along in life and function effectively, we don't need final answers of the sort that would be distributed by an omniscient being incapable of learning anything further about anything. We just need good-enough answers, and answers that we have a means of refining, amending or scuttling as necessary. Again, as with other partisans of what Kelley calls a "diaphanous" requirement for knowing, we have a demand for means of knowing that is somehow external and superior to any actual and limited (and because actual and limited, presumably inadequate) means of knowing. To know anything about anything "truly," we would allegedly have to step "outside" our limited percepts and cognition and become non-existent (like the Neil-God); for all merely existing things, including all conscious entities, are inherently limited. Heinlein, like other Kantians, is willing to accept that we can know certain things by perceptual and rational means, but cannot know others. But what is his means of differentiating between them? I think his acceptance of the segregation of entities into noumenal and phenomenal parts must have a far more blanketing and corrosive (if self-contradictory) effect on the possibility of knowledge than Heinlein suspects. Contra Heinlein, I'd say we can go pretty far in explaining the whys and wherefores of certain subjective preferences, even if we can't explain them exhaustively. Doesn't growing up in one cultural environment or another, including disproportionate exposure to certain menus, have something to do with the subjective preferences one develops, for example? How about the objectively identifiable chemistry of various foods, the savviness of experienced chefs, and so forth? How did Heinlein know Neil would especially like chocolate? Unless I miss my guess, prior to the taping of the interview they hadn't discussed Neil's tastes in ice cream or malted milks. Answer: almost everybody likes chocolate. And everybody knows everybody likes chocolate. That's something to do with the intrinsic nature of chocolate and how it (and sugar in general) interacts with normal human taste buds. In other words--even if we aren't inclined to devote the time and resources to figure out or simply can't figure out the causes of particular subject preferences, including those of someone who hates chocolate--we can know that there is something about chocolate itself, objectively, that tends to make it tasty to human beings. So I wouldn't say that the wherefores of subjective preferences are a flat unknowable, even if we don't know much about the wherefores of many of the preferences we become acquainted with. And I wouldn't say that the fact that we can't know everything about everything means that there's some fundamentally "alternative" viable means of knowing to perception and reason, with all the complexities that perceiving and reasoning may entail.

What does "a slow universal increase in the speed of passage of time" mean? What is the evidence for it and what would be the cause of it?

Greybird writes (or quotes): "Yet that Objectivist Living thread has been an invective-fest from all sides, providing little genuine understanding." It's hard to tell who said this from the large block of text Greybird pastes and/or quotes and/or comments on from the Facebook thread, but the above statement, despite the stretches of vituperation and counter-vituperation that can be found in this OL thread, is simply false. I can point to probably a few dozen, at least, of posts by GHS that are substantive and illuminating; some of which are very neat epistemological commentaries. And Neil, far from residing continuously in splenetic mode, has merely dropped in and out of it, and has indeed provided much sturdy and robust material for an expanded understanding of how little evidentiary support he can muster for his fantastical conclusions, and how little justified (logically) he is in making his illogical leaps. (I hope that my calm and detached, rational, just and indisputable observation here is not set down as mere "invective.") Of course, whether understanding is to be derived from any particular argument or exposition depends not only upon the argument and the strength of its logic and observations, but also upon the effort of the reader.

GHS writes: "You don't want to mess with The Prez. If you do, come equipped with a cast iron jock strap." We'll be okay, so long as nobody mentions pronouns.

JNS told GHS: "But you have as little basis to dismiss [your pain and relief from pain] as psychosomatic as to dismiss that you got an answer to your prayer, and couldn't bring yourself to believe it." Taking the underlying assumption here to its logical conclusion, we find that we never have any basis EVER for preferring a naturalistic explanation (i.e., one based on the perceivable and inferrable identities of things) over the undetectable supernatural one. Whether it's food on the table (for which people give thanks to the lord rather than to their hard work), or walking through a door (for which task the ancient Romans could appeal to a team of door gods for sanction and assistance), or doctrinally spawned sexual guilt, we allegedly have as little basis to believe that things act in accordance with their identity as that impossible-to-see gods swooped down and manipulated events to chastise or encourage or just confound us. What was the ONLY indication that "God" had anything to do with young-George's experience? Young-George's belief that it did (based upon what he had been taught and accepted, not on any evidence). If YG's belief in God constituted "evidence" that George might have "got an answer [from God rather than from his own mind] to [his] prayer," then belief per se is what constitutes evidence for any proposition that people might believe in. So, if I believe in door gods, maybe there are door gods. Who can tell? If you believe God mind-merged with you for 8 hours, maybe God mind-merged with you. Who could possibly dispute the "plausibility" of this "possibility," once the explanation-conditioning restraints of reality are set aside and once belief as such is deemed to be an overweeningly potent salvager of pseudo-analysis?

Oh George. That was just God's way of teaching you to be independent, or whatever.

WSS writes: "Probably not for Neil, but definitely for the early Campbell -- who left Dianetics even before the e-meters were constructed and peddled." Early Campbell? My impression from the reports by those who knew him is that he went downhill in later years, although I suppose he moved on from the dianetics fad to favor other mystical fads. Here's an excerpt from the article on Campbell in Wikipedia (I credit it because it matches my memory of other reports about Campbell): >>In 1949, Campbell also became interested in Dianetics. He wrote of L. Ron Hubbard's initial article in Astounding that "It is, I assure you in full and absolute sincerity, one of the most important articles ever published."[22] He also claimed to have successfully used dianetic techniques himself.... >>British novelist and critic Kingsley Amis dismissed Campbell brusquely: "I might just add as a sociological note that the editor of Astounding, himself a deviant figure of marked ferocity, seems to think he has invented a psi machine."[31]... >>SF writer Alfred Bester, an editor of Holiday Magazine and a sophisticated Manhattanite, recounted at some length his "one demented meeting" with Campbell, a man he imagined from afar to be "a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford." The first thing Campbell said to him was that Freud was dead, destroyed by the new discovery of Dianetics, which, he predicted, would win L. Ron Hubbard the Nobel Peace Prize. Campbell ordered the bemused Bester to "think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You've never stopped hating her for it." Bester commented: "It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science-fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles."[33]<< (I omitted parts that I didn't want to seem to endorse by including them and that do not pertain anyway to the mysticism. For example, socialist Moorcock is quoted in the middle of the above passages as intimating that anti-socialism is tantamount to fascism.)

I really am not enough of a seer to understand why referring to the mystics as "seers" is proof of dishonesty. I didn't get it out of "thin air," it just happened to be one of the words I keep on tap in my brain. Unfortunately, my Asimov autobiographies are in boxes, but I was able to get the following snippets from Google Books. Asimov goes into more detail about Campbell's saturating late-life mysticism. Campbell of course gave Hubbard his first forum, the Campbell-edited sf magazine Astounding/Analog, for expounding the dianetics baloney. Asimov: "This was going to develop into 'dianetics,' out of which Hubbard was to make his fortune and gain his godhead. Campbell was unabashedly enthusiastic about it, and this marked his first dip into the kind of mysticism that was to consume him for the rest of his life." [in Memory Yet Green, Isaac Asimov] "'Aha,' said Campbell, triumphantly, as he carefully took the reading. 'Negative stickiness.' "And that's how great nonsense discoveries are made." [in Joy Still Felt, Isaac Asimov]

Neil writes: "I think you and I have extraordinary life experiences in common. You say not to interpret them but that strikes me as a form of blanking out reality." George is suggesting that you don't interpret your experiences arbitrarily, with explanations that are non-explanations. George is suggesting that you investigate the experiences from the perspective of the nature of the subconscious. George's exact words are: "Forget about your 'explanations' and focus on the experiences themselves. Assume that your subconscious, not God or dead people, is telling you something." He is obviously proposing that a different kind of explanation or intepretation is possible, one that actually comports with the nature of things, rather than "explaining" things with constructs that are far less credible, and for which there is far less evidence, than that which they supposedly explain. He put the word "explanations" in quotation marks because he doesn't regard them as genuine explanations. Quotation marks can have that kind of self-distancing and ironizing function.

Interesting that Neil now adds John Campbell to the list of seers. Is this an implicit endorsement of the hogwash of dianetics?

Suppose a socialist, Mr. Socialist X, were to visit OL and engage in debate in a thread entitled "Is Mr. Socialist X justified (logically) in believing that the state should control the means of production and that goods and services should be coercively extracted from each according to his supposed ability and distributed to each according to his supposed need as determined or ordained by central planners?" Then suppose that this Mr. Socialist X could never come up with any actual evidence in favor of his own view or expose any major logical lacunae in the arguments of the pro-capitalist side. And suppose George H. Smith, after arguing reasonably for a while, got more and more annoyed with the perpetually displayed contempt for reason of the avowed proponent of "rational scientific socialism," and expressed that annoyance. Would Mr. Socialist X have any grounds whatever for making such a statement as the following: "I think the reason you've been taunting me is that I represent everything you decided was never going to be allowed into your [political] philosophy. "So I think one of the world's most published [capitalist] is a self-denying [socialist]." No. He would not have any grounds. It would just be a smear.