Reidy

Useful?

I wouldn't call it racist, but I would call it unconvincing. I've seen arguments to this effect by Ron Merril, Adam Reed and Jeff Walker, and they all struck me as labored and implausible. Word is that Ann Heller is going to go into this in her forthcoming biography of Rand. We'll have to see her version when the time comes.

This raises a couple of questions. 1. Does ARI actually collect royalties off Rand's books? Wakefield's statement is ambiguous enough for plausible denial, but that seems to be what he's saying. My understanding is that most of their income is from individual donations and that their startup money came from a donor (Ed Snider?) who later went over to what is now TAS. Peikoff may send them money, but I don't think he's a major source or that they have any formal or semi-formal royalty arrangement. Their annual budget, I recently read, is $7M, which is maybe 10 times what Rand's copyrights bring in. 2. Does anybody really judge Objectivism by the schisms or by the behavior of the ARI and its principals? The only people who pay any attention are either Objectivists, who've already decided they like the ideas, or antagonists who've likewise already made up their minds and are using this as an ex post facto rationalization for a judgement that patently has nothing to do with ARI. Jeff Walker and various conservatives come to mind, as well as people I've met (we've all met) personally. I have yet to yet to come across somebody who read Rand, thought her ideas over and decided against them on this basis. Would you really want to attract such frivolous people anyway?

AND it came out in 1959, not 1958. Maybe Branden (having seen the manuscript) is right and the typo is in the intro as published.

"Just enough" foreign language in narrative fiction is about 3 words per 100 pages. For idioms readers are likely already to know, like sacré bleu!, the limit goes up to 5. In Around the World with Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis did a good job of getting across the characters' lost, desperate condition, stuck on a Greek tramp steamer, by spelling out the crewmen's speech in Greek letters.

He wasn't the only one. Back when Bella Abzug was in congress, National Review did some digging in the archives of the Hunter College student newspaper ca. 1939, and there was Bella (Savitsky in those days) telling the capitalist nations to keep their hands off Germany as she follows her own path to socialism. In Hollywood Party Lloyd Billingsley documents Dalton Trumbo's gushiness over the Nazis under similar circumstances.

Nixon also met his wife in a community theater production of The Night of January 16 (the hated amateur version). She was Karen and he was the prosecutor.

How are your plans going to start up retail sales of the magazine?

Religious conservatism is well on its way out as a political force, less an issue than it was when Barbara Branden wrote this and much less than it was 20 or so years ago. Even then it wasn't as potent as liberals tried to make it look. The Republicans blew off the last of their religiosity in the Schiavo case and, seeing what a popular, political and legal disaster it was for them, went on to other pursuits. Now the Democrats - Clinton, Obama and Kerry among them - are the ones trying to lay their religion on us and wanting to impose their morality on us forcibly. Tracinski has been keeping track of "the rise of the religious left" in TIA Daily for at least a year, and Time did a cover story earlier this summer. One reason why the long-term outlook is bad for the Democrats is that they're working out of the Republicans' trashcan.

Lord of the Rings was three separate novels in the first place, wasn't it? #9 and #11 illustrate why this is a very risky venture commercially. The first to see the movie will be the hardcore fans, and they will be satisfied only with a literal translation of the book, all the dialog verbatim and all the characters and settings looking exactly as each reader imagined. No matter how good or bad the movie turns out to be, word of mouth will be poisonous. I STILL think they ought to do it in streamline-moderne period, like the current cover illustration.

An additional consideration is that the diaries had already been published, in 1997, without the parts about her split with Branden. These passages simply weren't commercial with a big book already in print.

Thomas Sowell has made the same point recently: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTYyY...DE2ODhhOGNjYzg= and http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWI4Y...mQzOGI0NTk4MWE= I guess it's catching on.

In the same essay Rand said she'd never changed her mind about anything, a claim even the keepers of the flame don't try to defend, having documented her youthful Nietzscheanism in the Journals. More broadly, she liked to claim she was more radical and original than she really was. She may have had second thoughts on this, at least in the case of Aristotle's Ethics. My impression is that the most potent thinkers and artists are so close to their creations that they honestly see things that way. Let the rest of us work out the details.

You mention a "premise of the first glance," but I don't see that your statement is a premise - a statement from which you derive conclusions - at all. It's a testable assertion that stands in need of evidence. How did you reach this conclusion? What cases did you examine? How many observers were making these judgements? What sort of verification / followup did you do? To bring in the classic quick-elimination test of seriousness: what would convince you that the assertion is false? Your first-glance suggestion looks like material for a straightforward psychological experiment. I'd be interested in seeing that experiment.

Elmer Fudd has always reminded me of Leonard Peikoff.

To answer #5: The only conference information I can find currently is at RofR: http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ArticleDi...ions/1817.shtml, # 7 and 8. I don't have a schedule for the Austin conference, but my recollection is that they invited Objectivists not approved by ARI.

The Anthem Foundation won't support heretics or buy them jobs, but they've invited some to speak at their conferences at Austin and Pittsburgh within the last year, as well as people who weren't Objectivists (or pseudo-Objectivist snarling wimps or what have you) at all. Machan, Huemer, Rasmussen and Lennox were on the program at one event or the other.

Some tips from my experience: 1. Toss the diced eggplant and the diced zucchini with a teaspoon of salt each and let them drain in separate colanders (for reasons that will become evident) for 30 - 60 minutes, then squeeze them dry with paper towels. This gives them better texture. 2. Saute the ingredients one at a time, in succession or in separate pans if you have them, setting them aside as done. First the onions, which should get soft and slightly brown over low heat, then zuccini, peppers (I like red or yellow better than green) and eggplant over higher heat. Combine everything, including the tomatoes, for a final cooking. 3. 45 minutes is longer than I'd do it. Taste and see when the vegetables are done to your liking. 4. If you have fresh basil, tear it and stir it in at serving time rather than during cooking.

A few years back the measure of being Somebody in Objectivist circles was to have been cited in Jeff Walker's book. Now it is to have been plagiarized by Victor.

Curious as to your source on the Turner billboards story. I never saw one or even heard of this until now. Somewhat related: when The NYT Sunday book section gave a nasty review to For the New Intellectual and Branden's letter of reply was too long to publish, he printed it as an ad for NBI.

I have yet to see a convincing case in which tactfully refusing to answer a nosey question could rationally be taken as a tacit answer to such a question. In the Worst Case Scenario, MYOB above, Non-Peikovian is phrasing his answer so as to suggest that the answer is yes. He could as easily have said "Janey is my friend, and I don't want to talk about her private life. You can ask her yourself." This carries none of the insinuations. Snooper, to judge from his phrasing in turn, seems to have made up his mind as to the answer already, and probably no answer, discreet, honest, respectful or not, will change his mind. A broader problem I see with Peikoff's argument is that you could rationalize any lie with it. Did you take the money from my purse? Did you finish the safety checks on the plane? Are you HIV-positive? And so on. In any of these instances, the motive for a false answer would be a desire to keep one's secrets to oneself.

Rand said in "The Objectivist Ethics" that the ability to feel pain is a necessary condition of knowing what's good or bad for us. She'd be in trouble on these points only if she'd said it was always and infallibly sufficient.

Historical note: in his Basic Principles course, Branden explicitly disapproved of privacy lies and said that MYOB is the appropriate answer to intrusive questions.

"Aristotle did not [test his theories]. Aristotle did not check. What is more, he did not think that he had to check." Wrong on three of three counts. See the biological writings.

Seconding Brant Gaede's observation that the Germans were coasting on their pre-Nazi scientific and technological eminence and that this doesn't mean they could have sustained it. Similarly, the USSR produced some great composers early on but not after the first generation. To say that things would have turned out differently if the Nazis hadn't been what they were and done what they did, is pretty much a tautology. People also say that if they they hadn't treated the Soviet populace so badly they could have fomented a popular uprising against Stalin and thereby won the war. The short answer to all this is: yeah, but they were and they did. I've seen BaalChatzaf's claim (in #3) that the Nazis were "about half way" to the bomb by war's end, but this seems to be a minority position. I'm not a historian of this or any other era, but what I've read most often is that this was a retroactive justification for American entry into the war; they had a basic research project early on, but it was cancelled in 1941, and they didn't try after that.