Reidy

Welcome back. When I saw your name I thought you were going to tell us that you were Eva/Tom/Sharon/Andie.

Eva, Tom and Sharon all in one city. Where is General Sherman when you need him?

I believe this new story like I believe emi is a phonetic spelling for opheloumai.

Eva does not confine her gibberish to English. "agapion demeicho, outhern emi" is, to venture a guess, "agapēn de mē exō, ouden ōpheloumai" (Greek New Testament, United Bible Societies 1983, p. 607). I don't recall seeing a single one of the words that appear in Eva's version. It looks like what bad voice-recognition software might type out if you spoke the correct text into it. Or good software if you set it to recognize Dutch. σωμα means "body" as in "psychosomatic". It does not mean "community". That would be πολις (whence “politics”) or δημος (whence “democracy”). "Power" would be "potentia" or "potestas", not "potens". "Potesta" is apparently a misspelling of "potestas": "power", as noted. It does not mean "singularity". One really ought to try for precision in Greek and Latin. The people who created these languages aren't here to defend themselves.

What are some of the published papers you helped your mother with (preferably online, but print will do)? Did she credit you? Academic papers usually put acknowledgements in an epilogue or in the first footnote.

No contradiction here; much of Appalachia has come back from the destructive mining and logging practices of a century or more ago and probably looks better than untouched wilds would. Franklin Toker's Fallingwater Rising is a good source on this.

Eva is in her endgame. Shall we get up a pool as to which forum she hits on next?

I wasn't investigating Eva. I was checking to see if anybody else had used the phrase in question, and Tom in Atlanta was the only one Bing could find. If he's such a friend I should think he would have taught Eva how to use a spell-checker.

Not only has Eva been popping up in several places on the O-web, she also has a confederate variously named "Tom" and "A former member" (http://www.meetup.com/Ayn-Rand-Fan-Club-Meetup-Group/messages/boards/thread/39126532 - for some reason OL won't let me paste or link. Alternatively, go to Bing and look up stasi phanomen plato; at the moment it's the third result.). They have a lot in common. Most salient is their penchant for supercilious name-dropping, but it doesn't stop there. Their prose styles are similar, including a fondness for "rather" and a cavalier way with spelling. They are the only two people to hold their odd theory of stasi phanomen in Plato. If Bing is to be believed they are the only two people ever to use the phrase. They are the only two to espouse their equally odd theory of Aristotelian matter. Eva identifies herself as living in Atlanta. Tom was posting to the Atlanta Objectivist Meetup board. Could one have been mentor to the other? What are the chances that two such people could come about independent of each other?

Palin's fans should enjoy this: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/28/palin-on-ukraine-i-told-you-so

Point of information: the estate and ARI are different entities with different revenue sources. Peikoff might or might not donate (does ARI publish this information?), but the royalties don't go to ARI. He did not provide the seed money to start the organization in 1985. On the other hand I've heard that payments from the Speakers Bureau, which can be important income to an impecunious young scholar, are a weapon to keep people in line.

Someone (possibly Cialdini himself) published an article several years ago in the Atlas Society magazine making these points in connection with the Genovese incident. In the same mythbusting tradition a reporter named Jimenez has recently published The Book of Matt about the Matthew Shepard story. His big finding is that the killing was a drug deal gone wrong and that Shepard's sexuality had nothing to do with it.

I don't think the part about Lesbos is even accurate. The story I've always heard is that it was the home of Sappho, a poet who ran a girls' school there. We know very little about her life. She wrote some pretty hot poems to women but others at least as hot to men. Either she was bi or the attempt to put her sexuality and her affections into modern terms is anachronistic and psychologically dubious. In any case, "lesbian," by every other account I've seen, comes from the island and not the other way around. Lysistrata and Antigone could count as feminist plays, but did the author name any others? Clytemnestra avenges her daughter by killing her husband, but she doesn't get away with it. Medea murders her children out of jealousy over her husband's cheating. A women driven to murder by her obsession with a man hardly qualifies as a feminist heroine. Barbara Branden years ago recommended The Greek Experience by C.M. Bowra. The edition for sale at Amazon dates from 1996, long after the recommendation, but the original came out in 1957.

Cut-and-paste jobs on this scale, even if you'd supplied a link, are a violation of property rights. Online authors typically get paid by the click, in which case you've taken money from him. Do Objectivists really need to be told this?

Some history: 1. The Articles of Confederation, Article IX, expressly granted the central government a monopoly over interstate mail. "The United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of ... establishing or regulating post offices from one State to another, throughout all the United States, and exacting such postage on the papers passing through the same as may be requisite to defray the expenses of the said office." The language in the Constitution is a distinct step back from this. 2. Congress had to pass a law in the nineteenth century to squelch the Pony Express. They wouldn't have had to if the Constitution had already given the feds a monopoly. This is apparently what Selene's Cato quote in #12 is talking about.

Long is right, but one could take the parallels further, using Rand's letters and journals and some of what FLlWright (a Sullivan employee in his youth) had to say about Lieber Meister. For example, she may have gotten her philosophical interest in units as a result of studying Sullivan, as I observed several years ago. Let us decide once and for all what is a unit and what is to be only a part of the unit, subordinated to it. A building is a unit — all else in it, such as sculpture, murals, ornaments, are parts of the unit and to be subordinated to the will of the architect, as creator of the unit... . As to the rules about this — my job of the future (Journals, p. 147.) Wright recalled the invention of the skyscraper in strikingly similar terms. The historical Sullivan, like the fictional Cameron, was not the first to build a high-rise but rather the first to design one. Sullivan realized — in one of those astonishing breakthroughs that seem obvious once they have occurred to somebody else — that a tall building ought to look tall; it ought to be a single, emphatically vertical entity rather than look like a stack of separate masonry structures. Wright wrote: There it was, in delicately penciled elevation. I stared at it and sensed what had happened. It was the Wainwright Building — and there was the very first human expression of a tall steel office building as architecture. It was tall and consistently so — a unit, where all before had been one cornice building on top of another cornice building (Kahn Lectures, Collected Writings v 3, p. 61). Or, equivalently: Until Louis Sullivan showed the way tall buildings never had unity. They were built up in layers. They were all fighting tallness instead of accepting it. What unity those false masses that pile up toward the New York and Chicago sky have now is due to the master mind that first perceived the tall building as a harmonious unit — its height triumphant. (Autobiography, p. 300.) The story of Sullivan's being ruined professionally and driven to drink by the malign influence of the 1893 Columbian Exposition has been around for a long time. Wright was one who promulgated it, and Rand is one who believed it. Not everybody does, though. Robert Twombly’s biography suggests (more plausibly, I think) that Sullivan’s drinking was one of the factors that wrecked his career. Erik Larson, in The Devil in the White City, points out that Sullivan got along fine with the neoclassicists at the Exposition and even built one of the buildings (albeit not in the official style); he only started complaining after his decline was underway. I've never read Autobiography of an Idea. My understanding is that it deals mainly with Sullivan's childhood. Thus Rand probably got her specifically architectural knowledge of him from other sources, including Wright.

William Bradford made the same point in his Liberty review of Judgment Day almost twenty-five years ago. Reading lets us, for example, stop and think, go back and reread, or spell an argument out in writing to expose its strengths and weaknesses - none of which can we do when listening to a lecture. Such activities are just what you want to avoid if your primary interest is building a following. If Rand and Branden hadn't split in 1968, NBI would have gone on doing what it was doing. Thus I doubt that a book version was in the works. ARI has somewhat taken back what Tara Smith said. She credited Peikoff with the observation that self-esteem is the reputation you acquire with yourself. Onkar Ghate, in an ARS / APA paper, attributed it correctly, identifying Branden as a "junior associate" of Rand's.

Another little-known Branden piece was a defense of free will in the USC Law Review in 1969. Apart from quoting Clarence Darrow it's nothing he didn't say elsewhere.

This would seem to be the first time the themes of Atlas Shrugged and of Rand's subsequent essays and speeches appeared in print. That gives it historical significance. I suspect that AR had a heavy editorial hand in it. I have my doubts about the extensive verbatim quotes. Does anybody here believe that Branden's profs were standing in line for their turn to talk just like Rand villains?

Rand said that people shouldn't judge on grounds of social standing and that, if they've cultivated a good character, this won't affect their sexual attractions. The finding that they do raises no problems for her. Her statement that a woman ought to look up to her man is not enough to tell us in what respects she ought to look up to him. Her novels indicate that social standing is not one of them. Kira's lover is, since the communist takeover, of very low status because of his ancestry. Dominique is a wealthy heiress and socialite. Her great love is a low-pay, low-skill laborer in a business that she owns outright. Dagny's first two loves are socially her peers, not her superiors, and her final love is, once more, a low-level employee.

Today's WSJ online had an interesting item, titled Two Newsmagazines in One! "Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds--the so-called circumpolar vortex--that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world."--Time, June 24, 1974"Not only does the cold spell not disprove climate change, it may well be that global warming could be making the occasional bout of extreme cold weather in the U.S. even more likely. Right now much of the U.S. is in the grip of a polar vortex, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a whirlwind of extremely cold, extremely dense air that forms near the poles."--Time.com, Jan. 6, 2014

Moralist, You wouldn't sell to customers who attend a church you don't approve? You wouldn't hire employees who don't like the same movies? You wouldn't buy from suppliers whose fashion sense isn't yours? What business are you in anyway? Perhaps I should ask: what are your values anyway?

The Bashir and Alec Baldwin cases are not parallel to this one. Bashir and Baldwin made some quite vicious remarks; Robertson simply stated his personal opinion and his personal religious conviction. The employers were within their rights in all three cases, but they did the right thing in the first two.

Rand was talking about government censorship, which she expressly distinguished from the actions of individuals or private organizations such as A&E. She'd say you are laying a sophistry on us.

Would I be out of place to ask who Greg is?