Reidy

In addition to moralist's refusal to provide evidence, which several have called him on, I see an additional problem in his theory that child molestation causes homosexuality: it flies in the face of prima facie common sense. If an experience has been terrifying or traumatic, one will presumably want to avoid that experience thereafter, not spend the rest of one's life trying to recreate it. The fact that a statement runs counter to intuition or common sense is not quite a disproof. The fact that the earth is spherical (when we can see otherwise simply by looking around, not to mention that if it were round we'd all fall off the sides and bottom) is an example to the contrary. It does mean, however, that one who makes such a claim had better have good enough evidence to overcome intuition. A thought occurs: is this supposed to happen only to people who've been molested by someone of the opposite sex? In that case I withdraw my objection.

In "'Extremism' or The Art of Smearing" (in CUI) Rand cagily suggests that she opposed entry but doesn't quite say so. The article uses "isolationism" as an example of an anti-concept that muddled the debate in the years before the US went to war. I once asked about her opinions of the war at an ARI presentation. Berliner replied that indeed she did want to stay out, thinking (perhaps correctly and in any event not alone) that Germany and the USSR would weaken each other to the point where domestic insurrection or minimum foreign intervention would destroy both. One effect of American entry was to turn things decisively in the USSR's favor and give it an empire in eastern Europe. Would the attack on Pearl Harbor have changed her mind? I think the conspiracy theories are as silly as the ones about 9-11 (which are for the most part a knockoff of the Pearl Harbor stories), but the US had acted provocatively with an oil embargo and covert intervention in China. As far as I know she never talked about this publicly.

For what it's worth, I was never molested as a child, and I'm queer as a coot (as Noel Coward used to put it). Depending on how strongly you assert the thesis, this is at best a piece of evidence against it and.at worst a drop-dead counterexample. Even if you could show a correlation, that is notoriously not enough to show causation. One possibility, were you to present the requested data, would be the one under examination: molestation causes homosexuality. Another, at least with victims subteen or older, would be that these children were so inclined in the first place. Whether or not they were born that way, their sexuality is in place by the time some perv puts the moves on them. Every child has heard from his parents don't talk to strangers, don't get in cars with strangers, if anybody touches you there, run away and so on. Most of them will follow this advice, so we might wonder why some of them don't. (Is this supposed to cause female homosexuality as well? My understanding is that women are virtually never molesters of pre-adolescent children.)

No wonder he gets no respct.

Taking up on #5, my understanding is that the illiteracy in such mailers is part of the ploy, intended to filter out anyone who even might be smart enough to see through the scam.

I wonder if we've seen the last of the sort of thing Selene quotes in #8. Piketty's book may turn out to be the Club of Rome or Arming America of its day.

Why do you say Brazil? Sydney is in Australia.

I don't know what the media will do with it, either, but early returns indicate that they're handling it responsibly. Here is one of two stories I've seen to date stating clearly that he got the guns legally. This was gun control at work. I can remember when you would have waited two weeks to read this in National Review.

I couldn't find an address, but http://ari.aynrand.org/media-center gives a phone number: 202 454 1997 (x203 to request a speaker, x202 to request an interview).

AR and Lillian Hellman (who wrote Song of Russia) kept popping up in each others' lives and afterwards. When Tallulah Bankhead was knocking 'em dead in Hellman's The Little Foxes in the 30s, her husband, John Emery, was dying in Rand's We the Living adaptation. Letters p. 43 reproduces her reply to a fund-raising solicitation from Dashiell Hammett, Hellman's lover. Long after their deaths, cable TV premiered biopix of them the same weekend. Several years ago ARI did some public presentations at the Hollywood branch library, with one on Rand's political activites in her movie days. They said that the communists tried and failed all through the 30s to gain influence in the industry. What finally put them over was the war and the founding of the Office of War Information to coordinate the propaganda effort between Washington and Hollywood. The communists went out for the forward positions and pretty much had their way for the next several years.

A passing thought about this episode is that slave raids were standard procedure for the Greeks and Romans, whom we hold up as models of rationality. Many women, perhaps the majority, ended up in brothels. It was the worst imaginable fate for a woman, as the mines were for a man.

My impression is that Peikoff is retired and out of the picture. In that case, we shouldn't conclude much, if anything, from his silence on the matter.

A couple of facts come to mind about the Q&A sessions: 1. Rand recorded them. 2. She announced them in The Objectivist. This does not harmonize with the story that she didn't want the public (the same public that read The Objectivist) to see them. The estate did the responsible thing by publishing, and it did the responsible thing by noting that these were not finished writings. Destroying the writings and audios she wanted to keep secret was not her only option. Somerset Maugham found his first draft of Of Human Bondage an embarrassment, but he figured it would have some scholarly interest. So he donated the manuscript to Harvard with the provision that they could show it to credentialed researchers but neither the university nor the scholars could publish its contents. Rand didn't make use of this option either. I have this vision of her, in later years, enjoying the thought of setting off debates like this one. I almost feel sorry for Peikoff and the people around him. They take abuse when they suppress, rewrite or exclude. Now they take abuse when they don't.

Don't see why not. This wouldn't be a difficult question for an Objectivist, since rape entails the use of coercion, and an Objectivist would never condone that. If you have the famous scene in The Fountainhead in mind, it isn't rape. The story spends a chapter or two establishing that this is what Dominique wants and that it's the only way she wants to be taken. Welcome to OL.

The Blaze article doesn't give us enough to go on. We'd need at least a few minutes' video with a chance to see if he really was disruptive and really refused to yield. The father says that he was being arrested merely for running over the two-minute limit, but he's not the most reliable source on this. I can't help being reminded of the student thugs who, since the 1960s, have claimed that obstruction and violence are expressions of free speech. A private school has a right to assign any book an adult could legitimately read. You could make exceptions for libel or copyright violation, but the same principles would apply here as anywhere else. (If they want to give the kids rough sex, I'd hope they'd assign The Fountainhead.)

When I said in #26 Pleasure is one kind (maybe the only kind) of end in itself, and you need ends-in-themselves to stop the infinite regress. Darrel asked in #32 Yes, I would stand by the claim that pleasure is an object we can pursue for its own sake and not for the sake of some further object. Some claims I'm not making here are: - Pleasure is always a sufficient reason for picking some course of action; - Pleasure is always preferable to any other end; - Pleasure is, by definition, what makes some object and worth pursuing. Rand was aware, in "The Objectivist Ethics," of the fact that ends-means series have to reach an end. VoS p. 17: Aristotle makes the same point: They both say, and I say, that a series of means to ends needs an ultimate end. Rand says this is life, and Aristotle says it is eudaimonia (whose correct translation is beside the point here). Some philosophers have pointed out that this, if you take it a certain way, is fallacious. Every means-end series has to stop someplace does not entail there is someplace where they all must stop any more than everybody loves somebody entails that there is somebody whom everybody loves. One solution is to distinguish between two kinds of purposive explanation. I've never seen the distinction in the Objectivist literature, but I don't see that it's inconsistent. We might call one kind "first person." It's the what we do when deliberating technically about our own actions. The other, then is "third person," which we do in ethical analysis. (Calling them "third person" doesn't mean that we can't do them about our own pursuits, but this is still a different kind of explaining.) Pleasure can be (I didn't say "always and necessarily is") adequate. We can have indefinitely many ends in themselves that are strong enough to complete an explanation. When we do the other kind of deliberation, by contrast, we need to go further. Third person is the kind of explanation that can go all the way to an ultimate end but which we hardly ever need to make up our minds in practice. One analogy might come from biology. Somewhere I read that when we walk or ride a bicycle or drive a car we constantly solve differential equations in order to stay on course. Even if you know what a differential equation is you can get around. A first-person explanation here might have to do with where you're going, what are traffic conditions and what obstacles might be in the way. An engineering explanation would need to spell out those equations, but you don't. Others might come from economics. You make decisions about what to spend and what to save and which available good to buy, and in doing so you participate in the setting of interest rates. An economist needs to know what's going on in these respects, but you don't.

(Hate to keep hijacking the thread, but I can't resist.) She did. If you read Wright's autobiographical account of the building against her fictional account of the Stoddard Temple you'll see that the first was a source for the second. (And DID you know that the photo at left [as of ,today; no telling what will be there when scholars pore through these archival treasures a century hence] was taken at UT? The background is the inner side of one of the colossal planter boxes shown e.g. in #21.) If I must address the topic: much of the current conversation has turned on a failure to distinguish between values and appropriate, conducive-to-life values. An alcoholic acts to gain / keep alcohol, so it's a value to him. To point out that it's a bad value does not contradict this. Pleasure need not be conducive to productivity. Sometimes it is, and sometimes not. Do you think Hank and Dagny were fucking in order to make themselves more productive? If you insist that pleasure needs to be for productivity then you haven't solved anything, because you then have to ask yourself why we should be productive. As Aristotle and Rand both pointed out, these means-end series have to stop somewhere. Pleasure is one kind (maybe the only kind) of end in itself, and you need ends-in-themselves to stop the infinite regress. The question seems more complicated than it is, largely because most of our value decisions don't require us to go all the way back to the source of the means-end series. When you order in a restaurant you consider what you like plus price and maybe some health concerns. The right decision is conducive to life, and if you wanted you could spell out the argument, but you don't have to take that explicitly into consideration. The only times where you might are situations of extreme duress that most of us never face - do I value this person enough to risk my life? do I live with ALS or opt for assisted suicide?

This, they say, is the point of Milton's Paradise Lost. I'm not qualified to judge.

Unity Temple in Oak Park IL is the first esthetically serious poured concrete building in the US and is of tremendous value to me.

Nerian: (You don't have to answer this.) Are we giving the answers you expected?

Ralph who? This sounds like what a lot of libertarians were saying in the 60s, under the influence of Hess and Rothbard. You could go to a love-in and spot the libertarians; they were the ones who wore full hippie duds with saddle shoes. Nothing came of it then, and I predict that nothing will come of now. Back then a lot of people believed that statists were individualists and libertarians at heart. Subsequent history has not been kind to this belief.

Thanks for the tip. Another possibility is Richard Neutra, the architect whose Von Sternberg house Rand lived in. He came from Vienna, and he and Wittgenstein knew some of the same people. Wittgenstein had a brief career as an architect - one house in Vienna for his sister and her family.

A pirate edition would be one that makes unauthorized and illegal (if the owner wants to pursue it) use of copyrighted material - the character names, the quotations and the cover design.

What you describe is classic altruistic blackmail. Get out now, whatever the short-term costs. Rearden married such a woman, and you know what happened to him.

Maybe somebody can't say no to some addictive substance, but he doesn't have to drive in that condition. What the law should do about drunk (/etc.) driving and how we can avoid it as drivers or pedestrians are two separate questions. We can't be entirely safe from any risk, but here we can take some precautions. Try not to drive at dangerous times (e.g. closing time for bars) and learn to watch for the signs: weaving, abrupt lane changes or speed changes, open windows in cold weather and so on. Finally, I don't see why such dangers would argue for prohibition. Nobody draws this conclusion about alcohol.