Reidy

Something tells me that these are pirate editions. Have you looked into this?

I have no trouble seeing deliberate endangerment, such as impaired driving, as a case of coercion. I've never seen any Objectivist, professional or not, argue otherwise.

I'm all for the latter.

You're right.

That's one reason. Another is to show the magnitude of what Stadler has done to himself and has accomplished by his refusal to judge and consider the consequences of what he's doing. Additionally, the story needs a few big knockout punches to consummate the economic and social collapse. This is one. The New York blackout is another.

Rand was personally quite condemnatory toward homosexuality and believed, without publicly explaining why, that this followed from her upstream ethical theories. People try various arguments and interpretations to rationalize her condemnation away: - it was her personal opinion, not part of her theory; - she meant that homosexuality would be wrong for her, not that it was wrong for anybody else; - [my personal favorite] devil Branden made her do it against her own better judgement; and will probably try to rationalize it away in the current thread. I find such attempts unconvincing. Branden seconded her enthusiastically at least as late as Judgement Day but has since recanted. Peikoff is OK with homosexuality but didn't say so until well after Rand's death. I've never seen him acknowledge that he differs with her on this point. The new policy from the Peikoff circle was the occasion of one of their characteristic rewritings of history. Her lengthliest disquisition on the subject was at a Ford Hall Forum q&a. It became the most-quoted, most-discussed remark she ever made in a q&a, and ARI sold the audio for years, but the quote didn't make it into Mayhew's book.

Side point: though I don't have any citations at hand, I've read that Dewey, like Peikoff and Rand, considered Kant's duty-centered ethics a source of Naziism.

A good place to start would be pragmatism in the Ayn Rand Lexicon. You could then follow up on the entry's sources. For her evaluation of Dewey's educational theories see "The Comprachicos" in The New Left: the Anti-Industrial Revolution. Dewey was a pragmatist. Kant was not; he lived and wrote several generations before the notion came along. If you find out a connection between Kant and pragmatism, let us know. If you find it in Peikoff, see below. Dewey as individualist is a new one. This might allude to the undisciplined, unintellectual self-indulgence that his educational theories supposedly promote. If so, it's grossly incompatible with Rand's understanding of the term. A word to the wise: What I'm about to tell you might hurt at this stage of your Objectivist education, but it will only hurt worse if you put it off. Like many original and important philosophers at least as far back as Aristotle, Rand was not at her best as a historian or critic. You should not take her word (or Peikoff's) in these matters. See if you can spell out a case of your own for some claim you want to make in the history of philosophy. If you can't, keep it under wraps until you can.

Are you really looking to be preached to? Most of us, when we pick a novel, are looking to be entertained. That said, some novelists have spent time in Rand's orbit. Kay Nolte Smith may be the best-known. A Tale of the Wind is a multigenerational saga of life in the nineteenth-century French theater and one of my all-time favorites. I didn't like her others so well. Erika Holzer is another. An Eye for an Eye became a movie that starred Sally Field. Shelley Reuben writes mysteries that draw on her expertise in arson detection. In Weeping she gave her protagonist too many gratuitous foibles and self-doubts, as if she were straining to get out from under the Randian shadow. I share the others' enthusiasm (in Nerian's link at #3) for Merwin and Webster. My favorite is Comrade John, available online. This, I suspect, is where Rand got the idea of architectural ghosting that figures in The Fountainhead. Enjoy your readings.

Rand's position is that sex is never purely body; what you find arousing, according to Rand, follows automatically from what you've done with your mind to date. If you prefer porn to sex with a live and caring partner you have a problem and you ought to work it through. Otherwise, while it's not preferable to the real thing, I don't see any reason to condemn it.

I'm skeptical. "Coincidence" is such a modern term that I have to wonder what word the quote is translating. My security app warns against following this link, but plenty of others alco attribute it to Huneu (whoever that may be). The ones toward the top of Bing's findings, at any rate, do not give it a detailed citation. Thus I remain unconvinced.

Give her an e-copy and you won't have to worry.

On the other hand, Ellis Wyatt invented fracking.

I'm curious: how do the period touches in Atlas Shrugged strike a first-time reader in the twenty-first century? When I first read the book in the early 60s they were a bit of distraction, as if the story were trying to be contemporary but not quite succeeding. Their effect must be quite different today.

It's from the scene between Toohey and Keating after Toohey has learned about the deal Keating cut with Roark over the Cortlandt commission.

Maybe he did early on, but he was their chief technical officer before his promotion. Thus he'd been a manager more recently than he'd been a developer.

About #3: Mozilla is a non-profit, so it's not strictly speaking a business nor is (was) Eich a businessman.

In LA we talked of nothing else for at least two years, and nobody sided with Rand.

Bill / Eva / Andie / Tom / et al. is back, semiliterate in philosophy (#21 reads as if somebody had written an Aristotle plugin for the Postmodernism Generator), illiterate in classics ("esse" is an infinitive, not an indicative; "is" would be "est" in Latin or εστι in Greek) and excessively fond of "rather".

Fine, but the book is not set in the 50s. Most of the technological and pop-cultural details (business trips by train, network radio, movie newsreels) place it in the 40s; "rotter", I understand, was in use as far back as the nineteenth century.

This is good news for gun rights, but it won't help California Republicans as the state is irretrievably Democratic. The best strategy for gun-rights people would be to take the high road and let the incident speak for itself and not look vindictive by leaning too hard on it. Lee also wants to ban violent video games.

Rand gave several reasons for endorsing Nixon in 1968. He wanted to end the draft (and did, though not until his second term). He supported the ABM program. He talked a free-market line. I suspect her endorsement also had to do with the fact that he had Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson (sometime NBI student) among his advisors, though she never said this. In 1972 she endorsed him because he wasn't McGovern.

Note also the use of "discreet" for "discrete".

"Bill Harris", the new persona at OO, is the fourth I've seen. He has skipped "Eva"'s start-out-nice phase and proceeded directly to intellectual name-dropping. Demented name-calling will be next. His spelling is better than "Eva"'s, and he avoids the overuse of "rather" that was so characteristic of "Eva" and "Tom". He's locking horns with Boydstun on physics. This is going to be the most fun since "Eva" took on George Smith on political philosophy.

A side point if you're looking into Aristotle is that his vocabulary doesn't match up one-to-one with ours. His word logos gets translated variously as definition, word, expression, sentence, formula or account, so an occurrence of definition is some translator's judgement as to which of these applies. I suspect that Joseph's book gave Rand her mistaken impression that Aristotle said "A is A" and that he formulated a "law of identity." Joseph didn't write as a historian and didn't always distinguish between Aristotle and his tradition. Thus one might infer that anything he says is what Aristotle says.