Reidy

The best explanation of how the building communicates reason comes from somebody who (apparently) never saw it in person: The Temple was to be a small building of grey limestone. Its lines were horizontal, not the lines reaching to heaven, but the lines of the earth. It seemed to spread over the ground like arms outstretched at shoulder-height, palms down, in great, silent acceptance. It did not cling to the soil and it did not crouch under the sky. It seemed to lift the earth, and its few vertical shafts pulled the sky down. It was scaled to human height in such a manner that it did not dwarf man, but stood as a setting that made his figure the only absolute, the gauge of perfection by which all dimensions were to be judged. When a man entered this temple, he would feel space molded around him, for him, as if it had waited for his entrance, to be completed. It was a joyous place, with the joy of exaltation that must be quiet. It was a place where one would come to feel sinless and strong, to find the peace of spirit never granted save by one's own glory. The Fountainhead, 343

Here is a video of one of the most beautiful places in the world. I have long believed that Wright's autobiographical account of the building was Rand's source for the Stoddard Temple in The Fountinhead.

3% - 4% is the range I've seen. The 10% attributed to Kinsey came about, I've read, from two causes. The first is that he said that 10% had been through a phase, not 10% are gay. To say that 80% of adults have attended high school is not to say that 80% are currently in high school. The second is that his sampling methods were faulty by modern standards, as he mixed self-selecting with randomly-selected interviewees. The gays in the UI vicinity could have volunteered in disproportionate numbers in order to skew the results, and by some accounts that is just what they did.

I wonder if people in fact think male-on-male child molestation is worse than male-on-female. How would you measure this? One source of information would be conviction rates for men accused of one or the other. The claim predicts a higher rate for male-on-male, because juries more easily condemn it. Or sentences for those convicted. Another would be a survey of literary or dramatic treatments of these acts, with information about how these works fared commercially. Lolita is the only one that comes to mind. Maybe there are others, but I'd have to see some hard data before I accepted this.

If you'll pardon the expression.

Plato never went to Egypt. Imhotep lived more than 2000 years before Plato and Aristotle, and they never heard of him. That is why you will find no documentation of a connection. Aristotle wrote about biology but not about medicine, and neither of them wrote about building.

Wouldn't any city anywhere meet this condition if its streets were on a rectangular grid?

The tabs in the old days used to emphasize gruesome crimes, "I cut out her heart and stomped on it" being the all-purpose (and probably fictiitous) example. They didn't treat sexual crimes, though. I suspect that this, like the rest of his remarks about sexual psychology, tell us more about Sanders than about anything in the external world. He was making it up in the confident expectation that his readers wouldn't question him. The Sanders revelations aren't surprising if you were around back then. His cohort were quite crudely, noisily misogynistic, and quite hateful toward gays, before the party line changed. Conservatives took the housewifely virtues for granted, but they didn't advertise their contempt for women. They would have disapproved of homosexuality if you had asked them, but they didn't bring the topic up otherwise.

So that's what sexual imprintation means.

If Bernie Sanders is to be believed, straight women are the ones who get their sexuality imprinted on them, or so, at least, they wish. He and Moralist could get some synergy going. (Is getting your sexuality imprinted anything like getting a tattoo? Does it hurt?)

This is most reminiscent of Allen Drury's Advise and Consent (1959). There the president's cronies try to blackmail a closeted senator into voting their way on a confirmation, and the senator commits suicide (as such people always did in those days). To date we have no evidence that anybody used this to sway Hastert's vote. (So THAT's why the coach was so willing to help me with my holds!)

Here's one for the low birth rate. Don't ask me how to link that up with the vote in Ireland.

Varoufakis came up on OL a few months ago when we noted that he likes to cite Kant. Look up "varoufakis kant" on a search engine for more data on this.

The context that #32 supplies also shows that this entire thread rests on a mistaken assumption that the "ought" quoted in #1 is a moral "ought" when it isn't. If I were to say "the turkey ought to be done; I put it in the oven three hours ago" and Curi were to reply "that's silly; morality doesn't apply to turkeys, least of all dead ones" he'd be making the same mistake.

Seconding #6, I think that the original objection here rests on an equivocation. "Ought" is a notoriously ambiguous word. You might call this occurrence a technical ought. If a state is to be reached or a conclusion is to be true, its necessary conditions must be satisfied. The conclusion might be unsound if you take it to state a medical or esthetic or (heaven forfend) moral ought, but you don't have to. One way to make the original quote palatable is to put just "must" in the conclusion and leave out the synonyms (in this case) "ought" or "should". I don't understand your distinction between Rand-oriented on the one hand and Branden-oriented or Kelley-oriented on the other. I've been following OL for several years, and I see much more discussion of Rand than of the others. If volume isn't your criterion, what is?

I can't help remembering Rand's beliefs (as reported by BB) that cigarettes are harmless and that cancer is a result of emotional repression - until she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Let's agree to wait and see what happens when they're dead.

Existence after death (as a living organism though not, e.g. as a body) is a contradiction in terms, out of bounds for anybody. A legacy or reputation or history is not subject to this limitation.

This conversation brings up a point Aristotle made. His word eudamonia is hard to translate. The standard, happiness, is misleading, because he talks of it as a long-term character trait, not a momentary mood as happiness is. One can feel eudaimonia in the face of calamity, he says, and children don't feel it; neither of these is true of happiness. Eudaimonia overlaps largely with the modern notion of self-esteem, but that would be hopelessly anachronistic as a translation. To get to the point, Aristotle states that one's eudaimonia can be affected for better or worse by what happens to one's descendants after one's death. This isn't true of happiness or of self-esteem. That points to success or the etymologically correct blessedness. Depending on sectarian leanings, Objectivists leave their money either to TAS or ARI, both of which are happy to take it.

During her HUAC testimony she remarked that "children never smile in Soviet Russia except by accident." This always struck me as hyperbole, but perhaps not.

One place where she said this was in a Donohue interview. I'm pretty sure it was an original and not a quote.

Don't ask where I heard this, but they say that a new and much-improved version of The Literary Art of Ayn Rand is coming out this year. If you have the coveted first edition, now is the time to sell it and collect your $109.

According to the biographers, there was briefly a prospect of Garbo coming out of retirement to play Dominique (a phone call or two) and a more serious prospect of hiring Frank Lloyd Wright as designer. That would have been a movie worth watching.

Is the Bible proof of the existence of God?Nandu Aditya1.6k upvotes by Peter Reidy, Ravi Yadav, Justin Eiler, (more) Is DC comics proof of existence of Batman? Written 18 Apr. 23,409 views.

And that's just for the oral arguments. God knows what they must be charging for the kinky stuff.