Starbuckle

Rand always had a great charisma in her public appearances, despite any "stiffness" entailed by the way she read her lectures, and was often great on her feet in Q&A; though, as has been often noted, she sometimes unfairly blasted questioners. Barbara Branden's bio includes a description of Rand's lecture style and why she was so appealing, always drawing overflow crowds. Claiming that Rand was always "fucking horrible" as a public presence is extremely offensive and gratuitous. What is the point in making such a vulgar statement, except, like any troll, to annoy people who like and appreciate Rand? (And why would anybody who thinks Rand's public appearances were uniformly "fucking horrible" assiduously seek them out?)

Michael Marotta wrote: "That said, alone on an island, how does Robinson Crusoe survive without the approval of other people?" A great movie to watch about this subject (whether it's approval or visibility or any other psychological benefit we get from interacting with others) is "Cast Away," starring Tom Hanks. Chuck Noland is a FedEx agent who is about to get married when a FedEx plane he's traveling on crashes. Noland is the only survivor. He makes it to the shore of the nearby island. Nobody comes to rescue him and he is far from civilization. He is alone for many years, with no prospect of returning to society. Though he has learned to survive physically, in his loneliness Noland does once almost kill himself. The memory of his girlfriend helps keep him alive. So does painting a face on a basketball from one of the FedEx packages that washed ashore; he talks to this object as if it were a person. It's not giving away too much to report that Noland does eventually leave the island, but too late to renew his relationship with his girlfriend, who still cares deeply for him. After the movie came out, this development--Noland's loss of his girlfriend despite having finally escaped from the island--was slammed by at least one viewer on an Objectivist discussion board. Presumably, Noland's success in returning to society was thematically undercut by his then being obliged to give up the person he cares about most. Presumably, we were being handed a tragic sense of life, or some such nonsense, no matter how dramatically explicable, plausible and even necessary was this disappointment. Yet taken as a whole, the movie can only be understood as strongly affirming the possibilities of life. The story's ending is unambiguously optimistic. First, Noland explains to a friend (and to us) why he remains hopeful about his future despite the severe blow he has just suffered in losing the chance to be with a woman who, through his memory of her, sustained him throughout years of isolation. Then, in a skillful and understated final scene, we see Noland pursue one of the many prospects that his new life in society has to offer. Life goes on.

Engle: "In a way, it is nice to see her struggle to get her ideas out under camera-pressure." HuH? She apparently didn't realize she was being filmed. I'm not sure what you mean by saying that she has a "doe in headlights" look. Rand always read from a script, and when delivering this one flubbed a few lines and exhibited physical weakness because of her advancing years and recent illness.

I listened to the speech a few times before I ever saw it on video (VHS). I first heard it some time in the early 80s, not long after she died. What sticks in my mind the most: * She doesn't want to be photographed. "I am much too old for zat. Just leave me as I am." Of course, she was on camera... * Racket from some crewmen moving stuff around at one point. "I seem to have competition." * Roar of approval when she announces that "..._I_ am writing a nine-hour teleplay of Atlas Shrugged." * One last dig at I guess libertarianism (or whatever "that movement" was) in response to a (written) question about the difference been man's life and happiness as a standard of morality. "I don't regard zis as a legitimate question. I know what sort of movement is behind zat kind of junk. If you really don't understand it, read Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged. It will explain it to you very clearly. And I do not grant anyone ze premise zat zat speech is unclear."

Three years ago, Barbara Branden wrote: "Yes, [Yaron Brook is] a good fundraiser. But isn't one of the jobs of the president of a company to find ways to convince the public of the attractiveness and desirability of his product? Brook is surely not succeeding at that." Brook was very successful recently in convincing Diana Hsieh of the desirability of ARI's muzzle-discussion product, namely, the ideology of muzzle-discussionism as applied particularly to the implications and practice of fundamental principles of reason, independence and integrity. It is just wrong to suggest that Brook has not been effective in this sort of thing. Despite some recent cracks in the facade, he managed with a great surge of heroic effort to plaster them over, and now all ARI drones march in happy unity, all differentiation subsumed by the integration, all multiplicity made one.

GHS wrote: "My personal opinion is that the passages I have quoted expressed Lincoln's real beliefs." I think it's fair to say that Lincoln and others in the North, as well as many in the South, were reluctant to give due weight explicitly to the role of slavery in causing the war and, early in the war, about the prospects for emancipation. Lincoln had to be concerned about retaining the support of the border states that he had managed to prevent from joining the confederacy; and also about retaining the support of Norther Democrats and others who were less concerned about slavery than especially the radical Republicans, and who bridled at any suggestion that the war was about slavery. So Lincoln had clear and present political reasons for stressing the issue of restoring the union above all, as in his famous lines to Greeley. The South, for its part, in addition to any embarassment about putting the "right to enslave" front and center in any statement of why they were fighting, had hopes early on of getting help from Britain or France. The Republican program of prohibiting expansion of slavery into the territories was pretty radical at the time in light of the compromises and attempted comprises made in the decades leading up to the war (slavery permitted below a certain geographic line, but banned above it; or the doctrine of "popular sovereignty," leading to bleeding Kansas). I don't think Lincoln's political positioning gainsays the sincerity of his essential beliefs as he articulated them.

Keer wrote: "This ranks up there with Whip Inflation Now buttons and Al Gore's earthtones." Oh. I wonder if libertarians who oppose symbols, placards, bumper stickers because they are not treatises in political philosophy also oppose the Tea Party rallies for not being philosophical conventions--and even though many Tea Partiers have revisited the thought of the Founders as a result of their involvement. It seems to me that I remember a novel structured around a recurring gimmick, a question that people in the world of the novel kept asking themselves: "Who is John Galt?" This question, in isolation, is meaningless. It is like asking "Who is John Smith?" Like many gimmicks, symbols, bumper-sticker sayings and placard platitudes, however, it points to a larger whole beyond itself. Those who dismiss the Nolan Chart as vacuous and worthless would, presumably, regard it as completely irrelevant whether someone who stumbles across it begins to think of politics in a new way, perhaps even--who knows?--goes on to read the essay in which the chart is linked, and then goes on to read a book recommended by the author of that essay. Are they stuck in whatever conceptual oversimplifications are embedded in the first approximation of the chart? If a person points to a solution, and that solution is adopted, and that solution is complex and marvelous and adaptive, one may, if one is so inclined, certainly dismiss the pointing finger as having nothing to do with the solution. After all, all it did was point, right? Of what importance is that?

Oh Gawd.... I am being forced, for the first time in my life, to confront the yawning emptiness within, the tragic dearth of any independent inquiring capacity, the proliferent lacunae where my values and psycho-epistemology should be.... Who'd-a thunk it would be a preposterous little punk who would be able to destroy my beautiful wickedness.... Look what you've done...I'm melting...melting...oh what a world...what a world...

The interview at Asphere doesn't make clear what happened in 2007, if the 1992 deal was for a 15-year option. Was the option renewed for three years?

Shayme wrote: "I guess I better learn to write like a fawning sycophant in order not to have some nitwit who prefers appearance to substance pin a Herbert Spencer quote on me." Idiotic.

Yikes. All this cattiness about an effective little gimmick, the Nolan Chart, that has spurred some people to think that maybe conservative versus liberal doesn't exhaust the ideological possibilities. Has anyone been claiming that the Nolan Chart is a political treatise? If anyone's inquiry into political philosophy begins and ends with the Nolan Chart, were they really going to be better off had they never encountered the chart?

In the comment threads I've visited online about reports to do with the TSA scanning-and-groping, most commenters think what they're being subjected to is wrong and offensive. But there are always a few who say, "Look, if the alternative is being blown out of the sky by terrorists, I'm all FOR IT. Go AHEAD and zoom in on my privates. That's a minor inconvenience compared to being BLOWN OUT OF THE SKY." I have never yet been offered an alternative between two flights to my destination, one which I can board after dealing with the rude and mentally underprivileged minions of the TSA but which will be exempt from terrorist assualt, and another which I can board without having to submit to the TSA goons but which is scheduled to be blown out of the sky by terrorists before it lands. Of course, the persons who see these two as the only possible options--being sexually assualted in public by government thugs, or blown out of the sky by terrorists--are probably not open to discussion of alternative methods of shoring up security that include sanity and respect for the rights and dignity of fellow human beings. As long as the government slaps a sticker saying FOR YOUR SECURITY on a practice, no matter how vile that practice may be, these collaborators are all for it.

BC writes: "Measurement is a kind of experiment. Many physical quantities can be measured in several and sundry ways. We either perform a replication of the experiment (preferably) by an independent party (that eliminates observer bias) or doing an alternate experiment (which must be replicated) that implies the same verification. Almost all physical experiments can be done in several and sundry ways. That is the protocol for establishing an experimental result as kosher." I am being unclear. I was referring to a _specific_ measurement. I was also asking what entity you referring to with respect to its being measured to the 12th decimal place. Are you referring only to its size, to its location in space, or what?

"The 'philosophical corruption' of physics has produced the following: just about every electronic device that we use and the best understanding of what the Cosmos is doing (expanding at an accelerated pace). Some corruption. When Objectivists get going on physics I tend to become a bit testy." You're not being very specific with respect to what criticisms you're criticizing. There are critiques by non-Objectivist physicists about, for example, the suppositions of string theory. (See Smolin's The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next and Woit's Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law .) The Heisenberg uncertainty princple can be regarded as simply elaborating a measurement problem, but it has also been contended that it means that subatomic particles don't even come into existence until they are observed (whatever that could possibly mean). And isn't it possible that there can be both reasonable and unreasonable theorizing about physics (just as there is, say, about atmosphere and climate)? Presumably neither Harriman nor anyone else who finds problems in modern physics would claim that we don't know enough about subatomic particles to be able to build microchips. So your characterization seems like a straw man. IF someone is stating, "All modern physics is corrupt," and that's all that you're responding to, I would agree that that kind of blanket indictment doens't make any sense. It's a non-starter. But if you have a more specific criticism of a more specific criticism of any modern trends in physics, I would be interested to hear it. Irritation is not an argument.

I wrote: "How does one determine whether the prediction was accurate?" BC wrote: "Expensive and accurate laboratory equipment. That is how we know how accurate the theory is. We do it the old fashioned way: we test the theory empirically." I probably was unclear. I didn't mean, How do we test a testable theory? I understand about the experiments and things. I guess what I was trying to ask was, "How does one double-check the measurement?" What is being predicted in your example to the nth decimal place? Is it the location of an atom? An electron? In the macro world, if I want to doublecheck the length of a table edge, I just lay down the ruler again and turn to the other fellow in the room. "SEe? Twenty-two inches, give or take a quarter-inch, just as I said." Can the accuracy of the sort of measurement to which you are alluding be double-checked in this way to the 12th decimal place? A couple other questions have also occurred to me about your previous post. What makes the Standard Model of Particles and Fields the "best" physical model ever? And are you sure that you and Harriman are referring to the exact same theoretical claims?

George H. Smith writes: "Harriman may deserve some lumps for his manner of dealing with the McCaskey brouhaha, but let us not forget that McCaskey was not forcefully conscripted into the upper echelon of the ARI hierarchy. Was he so naive as to suppose that his dissent from a Peikoff-sanctioned project would carry no consequences? Who knows? Was Robespierre surprised when the engine of terror he helped to create was turned against him?" I agree, but I wouldn't be tentative about whether Harriman deserves lumps for his treatment of McCaskey. Harriman has certainly not registered any objection as the sequels to his complaints to Peikoff played out. Of course, the internal targets of these excommunications always had had information about the way things are; and as the years pass, the information keeps piling up. It does seem to me that the most distinguished and relatively independent-minded ones are the biggest targets or perhaps most likely to get sick of the straightjacket. I don't know much about McCaskey. But first in the post-Passion period there was Kelley, who failed at being a co-smearer of Barbara Branden; then, a few years later, George Reisman, right as he was publishing his monumental tome Capitalism that does more to make the moral and practical case for unhampered markets than all the ARI offerings put together.

The Hsiehs: "Now that ARI has explained [sic] recent events and its future policies, we do not regard further debate on those matters as fruitful." John Stuart Mill: "[T]he opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible.... To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common. "Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable."

I don't know what MSK is responding to.

BC wrote: "...the Standard Model of Particles and Fields which predicts to an accuracy of twelve decimal places following the decimal point." 1) What makes it the "best" physical model ever? 2) How does one determine whether the prediction was accurate? 3) Are you sure that you and Harriman are referring to the exact same theoretical claims?

This thread is a good source for random babbling. For example, if one needed some verisimilitudinous random babbling for a character in a novel, one could adapt some of the opinings uttered herein.

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017943.html According to an essay by Roger Donway reprinted at amnation.com, "Liberty is not the freedom of action that a people is morally obligated to put up with; it is the freedom of action that is left over after a people has put a stop to all the actions it considers intolerable." I am not sure what this means. Does it mean that I have full liberty no matter how circumscribed my freedom of action may be in a particular society? That I have practically only the liberty that I have in practical fact is only a truism. If I am locked in a cage and can walk around that cage at will, I have all the liberty to walk around the cage that I could possibly wish. Is there no justified moral claim to both the liberty that we're allowed to exercise AND the liberty that we aren't allowed to exercise but SHOULD be allowed to exercise in a society? My "should" implies that there is such a moral claim. As soon as the majority imposes some atrocious ban on the minority in the name of "living together"--outlawing gay sex or whatever--Donway's argument becomes very unclear and problematic indeed. What is the status then of moral claims to greater liberty if "rights" can be scare-quoted into mythological status? What I call my political rights are nothing but a specific kind of justified moral claim in a social context--a claim against intereference from others. Donway seems to be confusing protection of rights with rights themselves. I can have a justified moral claim to be left alone with respect to a certain abhorred activity that no one in a society respects. That doesn't mean that my justified moral claim--my right--doesn't exist. It just means that it's being violated. And how can the violation be cured, as it often has been by changes in society in various eras, unless sufficient numbers of people come to recognize the moral problem? The context in which one is trying to persuade persons to respect rights that they don't currently even recognize is certainly relevant. The lost liberty cannot be regained by talking about "axioms" is also evident. But there must be somebody who comes along and says, perhaps very "impractically": "This is WRONG! STOP!" Perhaps if the line of reasoning were better elaborated it would make more sense, but it seems to me that Donway is blending sense and nonsense in this essay in trying to play up practical context but downplay morality and rights. The reliance on Burke doesn't exactly allay concerns about where Donway would go with this line of thought. Why does Donway seem to regard concern with rights and concern with practical context as somehow antithetical? Moral understanding does evolve over time. One can't judge persons in every society and every era in exactly the same way given vast differences in circumstances and general states of knowledge. But, come on. Thomas Jefferson KNEW that slavery was evil. You can't read his various comments about slavery and not know that he knew that. How did he know? Because certain Locke-inspired moral conceptions nagged at him, having to do with human nature and rights and freedom and the like. Cf. the Declaration of Independence.

Yes, it's silly to say all that TSA gropers "enjoy" what they've been told to do. So why are they doing it? "I just work here"? Quit.

WS writes: "How sad for Objectivism that challengers are deposed rather than debated." Apt summary not only of the current episode but also of the much longer history.

I'm surprised to hear this query from Robert Campbell, usually so perspicacious: "Does Diana Hsieh really think that a position at the Objectivist Academic Center is still within reach?" The assumption of this question has already been proved wrong by an announcement at the OAC blog of a new course, "professor to be announced": "Moral Judgment and Suspension of Moral Judgement When Pragmatically Necessary: The Objective Balancing Act: An Appraisal and Guide for the Aspiring Objective Acolyte." The announcement of this course is too specifically timed to be anything but a response to the recent controversy and the Hsiehs' withdrawal from the field. And who could be better suited to teach it but the cheerfully chastened DH?

And they won't even let anybody discuss their bullshit at their site? I'm not surprised and not really dismayed, because I didn't expect better; but I would have preferred to be proved wrong. It's like that last scene with Darth Vader in "Jedi"; of course he could have decided to go with the flow of all his evil impulses and let the emperor destroy Luke, but there was after all that deep-lurking spark of good and self-respect within him to which Luke was able successfully to appeal. Alas, Ms. Hsieh seems to have elected to permanently abandon herself to the Dark Side. "THank you, thank you, thank you so much for explaining that you had not wanted us to even raise the issue of the glaring injustices and irrationality of the McCaskey episode!! What an error on our part for failing to grasp that even trying to grasp was misguided! We still have our disagreements, but...we'll SHUT UP NOW, MASTER!!!!!! Thank you for your guidance and forbearance! We're going to lie supinely on the floor now in the hope and prayer that you will please walk all over us on your way out! Thank you again for condescending to tell us in person to shut the fuck up!" Diana Hsieh is the same wench who scrawled an irate trillion-word screed whining that Chris Sciabarra was politic enough not to repeat in public every casually expressed negative thought he felt trusting enough to share with a supposed friend in private. Now, here Diana has been publicly humiliated and upbraided by Peikoff and Brook for the "crime" of merely asking questions and making a report of offensively unjust conduct, conduct inexplicable except in terms of socio-pathology and regarding which every non-schmoo ARI donor would want to know the whys and wherefores. And it turns out...she just didn't know that ARI would be unhappy with her even beginning to show an incipient pretense of independence and spine? Well, I don't believe it. I don't believe that she could not possibly have known. No, she chickened out. Because if this was the denouement she had expected all along, I don't know what her game plan could have been.