Reidy

The carjacked car had a Coexist bumper sticker: https://twitter.com/chelseagrunwald/status/325272428047646720/photo/1. Don't you love it?

National Review has run a couple of pieces about attempts to blame the bombing on conservatives, the Tea Party, etc.: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346033/partisan-speculation http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/346104/answer-liberals-prayers

Yes, but things won't be pushed through without debate because of the bombing. The Obama administration and its allies tried to do this with the Newtown shooting, and it was a bust. This would be a bigger bust.

I'm not sure that item 3 is true or that Rand believed it. The difference between the coat-hanger theory of predication (entities exist, and they have attributes; take away the attributes and eventually you get down to the bare entity) and the onion theory (take away the attributes and eventually nothing is left) is an ancient controversy, but I'm not aware that Rand endorsed the latter position. If she didn't, then problems with it are not problems with her theory. What are the sources for this in Rand?

The present analysis would seem to imply that the western European countries, which go in for heavy statism and economic interventionism, would be chronically at war with each other. In fact this hasn't happened in almost 70 years. Several have been involved in wars (along with the US) in the Balkans or outside Europe, but not with each other. Doesn't this bother you?

Point 2 in #42 above is Russell's paradox: if every class is a member of itself (as Frege had laid down as an axiom), what do you do with the class of all classes having no members? Is it a member of itself? Your insight is admirable but a century late.

As I recall my math and logic training, a set need not have membership criteria in any interesting sense. A teacher once used the example of the set containing the Eiffel Tower, her dog and the number five. No conceptual thread connects these three objects (except the trivial one of being one of these three objects), but they make up a set just the same.

No, I meant "hinky" (in the second sense).

This is hinky even by the standards that apply to hinky reports like this one. I never heard of this guy, although I was a news-literate college student, exposed to this stuff constantly back when it was going on. He presents no documentation and no corroborating witnesses. Most telling is that he's reading from a script. If he'd been there, he wouldn't need it.

That has been the official NBI / ARI line for over fifty years.

Some simple economics tells you that this would drive the price up, thereby attracting sellers and producers. 3-d printing would make its first big splash. A likelier way to get rid of ammo, economics also tells us, would be to put price controls on it. It will vanish like the morning dew.

That was Peikoff's experience, and it shows. Did you ever see him on FoxNews? Philosophy taught me how to follow an argument and to see what underlies somebody's position, whether he realizes it or not. It gave me practice in finding counter-examples that has been useful in my working life.

OPAR is Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff. He would not be pleased by anybody's confusing the two books. PARC is The Passion Ayn Rand's Critics, a reputedly ill-tempered attack on the BB and NB books, which got a lot of discussion here.

Yes, The Counter-Revolution of Science is light on science. After all, it's a book about political ideas and their history. It's heavy on scientism, though, and on the false analogies of human affairs to engineering and to physical science which got abroad in the early nineteenth century and which (Hayek claims) gave rise to socialism. I exhort the OL readership to check this out by reading the book. This is not to say that Hayek's analysis is correct. What are the errors and misperceptions you find there? Are you saying that he's wrong as a historian? If he's wrong about his titular thesis, couldn't he also be wrong about the points you're citing?

As I recall this book it's a study of how fake-scientific rationalism (or fake-rational scientism) gave rise to modern totalitarianism. Hence the title. It's worth reading in any case. Hayek's discussion of St. Simon's Parable would interest this readership, since, to judge from what Hayek says, St. Simon hit on the idea of Atlas Shrugged more than a century before Rand. I've always wondered if she knew anything about the Parable.

aynrandsociety.org is a special interest group of the American Philosophical Association, and most or all Objectivist academic philosophers belong to it. The site will tell you who has served as officer in the last two years and who has addressed their meetings. along with their schools. Not all the speakers are Objectivists, but they all respect Rand. Even if you aren't an academic, you can become a member, which is expensive, or a contributor, which is cheaper, and either gets you a subscription to the papers presented at the meetings. See the site for details. Having studied philosophy myself I wish you the best on your adventure. I made the mistake of going in hostile to academic philosophy and determined to promote Objectivism. The subject didn't become interesting until I realized that I was there to learn, not convert, and that most of the teachers were admirably qualified to help me do this. University of Pittsburgh has a reputation as an A-list philosophy department, though not many non-academics realize this.

As memory serves, Rand describes Galt's "greed" (not in the money sense) in the sex-on-the-tracks scene between him and Dagny. I don't have a copy at hand.

Sometimes I wonder why I even try to be a piss-and-moan Randroid. How can I compete with the likes of this?

If the ruling stands up on appeal I'll be happy. In the meantime I'm hopeful.

What was unsatisfactory about the survey course you first had in mind? What was the purpose it didn't serve? What changes (Rand-related or not) would make it better?

Ian Fleming must have gone through this process. Dr. Ask Me Later The Plumber Who Loved Me From Belgium With Love On Her Majesty's Cleanup Crew Snackbar Royale

1. What would you teach if you'd never heard of Rand? 2. How can you teach this better for having read her? What special insights does she have on the material?

I second the others who say that you shouldn't set out to indoctrinate your students. If you want to include Rand, Allan Gotthelf and Tibor Machan have written introductory texts on Objectivism. I haven't read them, but the Gotthelf text is supposed to be mostly on the upstream branches of Rand's theory rather than on the ethics and politics that usually get attention. You've presumably read "The Objectivist Ethics" and the rest of VoS. If you have time to read Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics before school starts, you might find some interesting, beginner-appropriate topics between the two books: where does value come from? what are the virtues and why are they virtues? Your students might be up to reading all of VoS but more than a fraction of Aristotle would be impractical. The Ayn Rand Society of the APA held a session several years ago on introductory teaching of Rand. You might be able to get copies of the papers if you contact them.

The latter was the canonical pronunciation back in the NBI era.

Village Big Fucking Deal About Nothing Sitcom of Errors A Basketball Season's Tale President-for-Life Lear Love's Tory's Lost