IrfanKhawaja

Robert is wrong in a technical sense about my being an OL participant but basically right: I'm a very, very infrequent participant in OL, and would prefer to respond to any comments at my own site.

You knew I'd be back after that pathetic performance, didn't you? Jonathan says: Yeah, "clown show" about says it, except that clowns are supposed to be entertaining. No need for me to bust a nut, though, since my main message is: I saw it coming, I called it, my sources confirmed it, and I've now been proven right. I do hope people will go back and re-read David Kelley and Will Thomas's pompous evasions from the original thread at the TAS site back in May: http://www.atlassociety.org/as/blog/2014/05/13/david-harriman-speaking-atlas-summit-2014 Remember Will Thomas's line, "Come to the Summit and find out!" So what did we all find out? We found out that when people desperately feel the need to evade an issue, and lack the self-knowledge to grasp what they're doing, they'll evade it in public, and put it online. Then they'll ask for money and expect to be taken seriously. Perhaps Will is on the verge of tears because he realizes how grotesque it is to be making a request of that kind under the circumstances. And what about David? On the one hand, in the May discussion, he complained that I didn't bring my questions about Harriman directly to him. In the last paragraph of the same note, he tells anyone with questions like mine to take their agenda "elsewhere." So much for getting the procedure straight! Then he speculated that I wasn't interested in "facts." He was all about "facts." So what "facts" has David brought to light about the questions I asked? After all that wind-up, and bluffing, and throat-clearing, what do they have to say about anything I asked about? In other words: what is their position on David Harriman's past complicity in ARI's 24-year-long campaign of defamation and fraud? They don't have one. They didn't mention it. It just didn't come up. Ex nihilo nihil fit. It gets better, though. My favorite moment is when Harriman tries pre-emptively to distance himself from ARI. He basically just comes out and says with a straight face that he wasn't associated with them because he wasn't an employee; he wasn't on the payroll. He got grants. Two paths diverged at ARI--employment or grant-recipient status--and that made all the difference. Put another way: his job was a matter of collecting ARI checks without having to punch a time card. So why should he have cared what their policies or principles were? I mean, the checks were rolling in, weren't they? Isn't that what matters? And why should he have cared about their decades of defamations of other people, or their disrespect for intellectual freedom? He was close enough to Leonard Peikoff to be high up in the pecking order, and close enough for his intellectual freedom to be perfectly secure. So none of their malfeasances were going to touch him, and that's what matters. "We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" David Harriman whispered to David Kelley. "No, we never had to," David Kelley rejoined. Harriman disclaims being in the official inner circle of ARI, but no one bothered to ask how he reconciles that with his having co-signed a letter, with Leonard Peikoff, denouncing Allan Gotthelf in TIA. "Co-authorship," David Kelley writes in Contested Legacy, "is a fairly intimate form of collaboration" (p. 35). There's a thought for you. Nor did anyone bother to read "Fact and Value" back to Harriman and point out that in it, Peikoff invites only those who agree with his and Schwartz's denunciations to remain in the movement. No, Harriman sits there and rambles on and on like a kind of self-induced Admiral Stockdale of Objectivism, struggling, twenty-four years after the fact, to figure out what the issues were or are. Earth to Harriman: it's called reading comprehension. You have to read the relevant texts to be able to discuss what they say. You won't get far as an "epistemologist" until you master the skill. And pretending not to know what the issues are doesn't do you any credit. It only adds stupidity to the original charge of dishonesty. What an asshole! The one genuine revelation in the video was Lapeyere's confession (in response to Ray Raad's question) that the phrase "Open Objectivism" was a committee decision, and principally motivated by the desire to appease ARI and work with them. That worked out well, didn't it? I always love when these practical CEO types try to get involved with ideas, get in over their heads, and then end up bewildered when none of their ideas work. How can that be? He runs a company. Can't you run ideas the same way? Jesus, what a lost cause. They're beyond criticism or even laughter at this point. They deserve to sink in the mire, where they belong.

So Jonathan's question is: what happened at the Atlas Summit? Just to remind everyone of the original context, recall that Will Thomas suggested that people with questions about Harriman's appearance ought to show up at The Atlas Summit "and find out" where he stood on his prior connection to ARI and Leonard Peikoff. I predicted that he would be asked no tough questions, and would effectively say nothing. What happened? I didn't go, but I asked someone who did. Summary version: He was asked no tough questions, and effectively said nothing. In fact, he disavowed the very suggestion that he had ever been closely connected with ARI or Peikoff at all. And really: how on earth could anyone have assumed that he was? Yes, he got some money from them, refused to disavow their denunciations or party lines, co-signed letters of denunciation with Peikoff, co-authored a book with Peikoff, edited the Journals under their auspices, and has kept mum about his friendship with David Kelley for about a quarter of a century. But I mean, come on--associated? With ARI? David Harriman? Just because a little ARI money has found its way into his bank account for a few years? I mean, that kind of thing happens to the best of us, right? You wake up one morning, check your bank balance, and there it is--another one of those annoying direct deposits from ARI. But you can't be held responsible for something like that. Apparently, Harriman also distanced himself from all ideological party lines. He was, he said, a purely independent thinker, interested only in the truth, principally the truth about induction. He ended his remarks with a sales pitch for a bridge he wanted to sell people--somewhere in Brooklyn, I think it was. A long list of people expressed a desire to buy it, then re-sell it, offering to donate the proceeds to TAS. I believe the auction will take place at the 2015 Atlas Summit, so make sure you go and "find out what happens" to it.

Like I said, collective amnesia is a bad thing. The difference between the two parties is that one side started the war and the other side didn't. Another difference: one side defended slavery and the other abolished it. Feel free to equate those things if you want, but nothing you've said even begins to make the case. Just as nothing you've so far said actually responds to anything I said about Harriman. Irfan

I haven't studied Harriman's work well enough to have an informed opinion on Ellen Stuttle's comments, so she may well be right. As for the Civil War analogy, I think Frederick Douglass's 1871 Decoration Day speech is worth reading and remembering. It's rather appropriate. Douglass was opposed to collective amnesia about the meaning of the Civil War--my point, too. Irfan

Michael, Thanks. You are a gracious host. And yes, I guess your post crossed with Brant's. Unfortunately, Brant's advice comes about a post too late for me to make any practical use of it. About sticking around, while I don't have any intention of "taking my material to another forum," I've promised myself lately to stop generating as much hotheaded stuff online as I have in the recent past, so I'll probably end up lurking more than I end up fulminating. Not that I'm promising. I realize it's anti-climactic, but I'm heading out to a conference tomorrow and will be caught up in it for a few days, so it'll be mid-week before I respond to anyone who responds to me (if anyone does). Irfan

I haven't posted here before, but since my name has come up here a couple of times--once in the context of a public denunciation of me--I have a few comments to offer. Some of what I have to say overlaps with what Jonathan and Jerry Biggers have already very competently said, but I don't think it'll hurt to add my two cents. Or more. As I see it, the fundamental question is whether it is morally legitimate for TAS to invite David Harriman to give a talk, ignoring Harriman's decades-long role at ARI, ignoring his obvious complicity in ARI's decades-long campaign of defamation, and treating as inconsequential what I regard as his obligation to acknowledge his wrongdoing and make public amends for it. You cannot legitimately be part of a decades-long campaign of defamation, then drop it without a word, and then pretend that you weren't part of it, and proceed as though nothing had happened. Nor can the sponsoring organization string along its clientele and the public with breathless but vacuous announcements about what might happen when Harriman takes the stage this summer at their Summit, with no indication whatsoever that any admission of guilt or amends will be forthcoming. The issue is really pretty simple. Either he is guilty or he is innocent of complicity in ARI's defamations. If he is guilty, he needs to acknowledge guilt and be treated thereafter as a guilty party. If he is innocent, he has to acknowledge that the evidence against him rises to more-than-probable cause and then maintain his innocence. What he can't do--and can't be permitted to do--is to spend years benefiting from an institution that sold itself as the Objectivist answer to the Spanish Inquisition, priding itself especially on its insistence on exceptionless moral judgment, and then suddenly turn around, act as though he bore no responsibility for his actions whatsoever, and as though moral judgment has now become totally irrelevant. That is the essence of dishonesty and irresponsibility. No one has the obligation to tolerate it. And no one has the moral right to facilitate it. But this horseshit is what David Kelley et al so righteously want to cram down our throats, treating TAS's critics as the guilty party, and insisting on deference and respect for Harriman, their great catch. I say all that because I disagree with Ellen Stuttle and others here who have made Harriman's views on physics the main focus. Personally, I have no opinion at all on Harriman's views on physics. I've never read Logical Leap, and have no qualifications to judge anyone's views on physics. (The last time I took physics was tenth grade and I got a C in it.) But unless Harriman's views on physics were at the level of the Flat Earth Society, I don't think it would be appropriate to denounce him morally for having false views about physics. Nor would I make a big moral deal about TAS's inviting someone with false views about physics. I'd leave all that to the physicists, and would expect them to discuss physics, not morality. My objection to Harriman is a moral one. I don't think it should be described as a matter of "ARI/TAS politics," either. I have no interested stake in ARI/TAS politics. I just regard myself as a moral critic of the Objectivist movement, full stop. And I regard myself as having made a criticism that no one in that movement can answer, least of all David Kelley. I happen to agree with Jerry Biggers about The Journals of Ayn Rand, but regard that as a non-essential side-issue in this context. I don't think the Journals should ever have been published at all, but would not have objected to the Harriman invitation on those grounds by themselves. (I agree with and appreciate a lot of the other things Jerry has said, including his implicit defenses of me.) In his "debate closing" post at TAS, Kelley has the nerve to bring up the "quarter of a century" for which he's known me, but doesn't have the integrity to respond to anything that his supposed colleague of a quarter of a century has to say. What then is the value of his having known me for so long? He waltzes on to the scene a week after the debate had gotten underway, doesn't say a word about any substantive matter in the debate, offers a saccharine homily about how sad he is about others' lack of objectivity as compared with his own presumably spotless record, then declares victory in a debate to which he has contributed not a single word, and closes it down so that he can have the last word. But ladies and gentlemen, he is "shocked" at everyone else's behavior--at how little interested in "facts" they are. Well. Let's see about that. He starts with this: This supposed policy is an ex post facto rationalization. If a blog has a policy, it makes sure that those posting know that the policy exists. I didn't see any such policy, and had I seen it, I would have observed it. But this is a policy that didn't exist until Kelley decided to fabricate it from whole cloth a week after a debate began--so that he could accuse people of impropriety for not observing a policy that had never existed. Kelley himself tells us that he was well aware that the invitation would "of course" create a "stir." And yet it didn't occur to him or to his PR people that people might take the occasion to create the stir on the very page on which the stir-worthy announcement had been made. So he waited a week before deciding that, well, this wasn't the time and place for the stir...that was of course coming. That is frankly so stupid as to provoke either incredulity or laughter or both. But sorry, I can't accept guilt for violating the terms of his "policy." Here is Kelley's next "argument": Jonathan has nicely taken this ridiculous set of assertions apart, but I have my own take on it. The weasel word that gets the whole accusation off the ground is "largely," which is Kelley's way of making a handwaving blanket accusation without having to get his hands dirty in specificities. A challenge for Kelley: name one claim of mine that evinced a lack of interest in facts. It is Kelley who refuses either to discuss the facts I identified or to offer any of his own. Who is not interested in facts, and who is interested in them? For all the bravado of his concern with facts, the fact remains that Kelley offers precisely nothing of a factual nature in answer to the claims I made or the questions I asked. Evidently, a concern for "facts" is evinced by not offering any. We are told that Harriman is prepared to reflect on and discuss openly his past work at ARI. That is a carefully legalistic and consummately uninformative formulation. If he is "prepared," why can't he tell us now, for public consumption, whether his reflections and discussions will involve a repudiation of his behavior at ARI? Why the need for such dramatic suspense, for private consultations, and for the aura of mystery? By the way: notice that this news comes a week after the discussion had begun, and while it involves claims about private discussions, according to Kelley, it's impertinent to ask questions in public about conversations that took place in private. The implication seems to me that we should have known about the impertinence of asking questions when we asked them. It has yet to be revealed what the impertinence was. The tacit assumption is that since the conversations were private, all further discussion about them should have remained private. Only those with the proper backstage passes would be privy to these private conversations. But the fundamental question ought to be: why the need for such concealment? TAS is the organization that has sold itself publicly as the face of Open Objectivism. Why is it that the purveyors of Open Objectivism--their phrase, not mine--should take such umbrage at questions asked in public? As for Kelley's non-sequitur about my lack of interest in facts, let me refute it in one sentence: in fact, I'm morbidly curious to have him tell me what facts he has in mind. Alas, he is the one who has prematurely ended the debate, so the constraints on fact-sharing are his, not mine. My favorite stuff comes at the end: Oh, David. What both shocks and saddens but doesn't surprise me is that the author of Truth and Toleration should be so little interested in truth, and so intolerant of those who expect it. What also shocks and saddens but doesn't surprise me is that the author of The Art of Reasoning should produce such artless reasoning and expect us to take it seriously. The "agenda" to which Kelley refers is called justice. Part of it involves recognizing that the principles that were true and applicable in 1989 are still true and applicable in 2014. "Healing" presupposes injury, and injury in this context presupposes the existence of those who inflicted the injuries. You cannot "heal" injustices by pretending that the injuries produced by injustice were somehow created ex nihilo and can somehow be forgiven in a great big group hug. When you do that, what you end up doing is alienating your erstwhile friends and colleagues of a quarter century--the ones who have spent that quarter of a century defending your name, your reputation, your honor, and your work with more vigor than you have--and you turn them into enemies for life. That is to compound injustice with injustice. The word for it is betrayal. Those of us who are "reliving the conflicts in the Objectivist movement" are the ones who actually remember, in full consciousness, what they were about. We are not "reliving" the original events in some psycho-traumatic way, but living the principles that gave rise to the conflicts then,and remain in force today. There's no great virtue in being a man of principle if that means that you've got a new principle for every new occasion. But that attitude toward principle accurately describes the leadership of the Objectivist movement today, ARI and TAS alike. Given that, I'm happy to take my "agenda" elsewhere, and would encourage others to do so as well. The leadership of this "movement," whether in its ARI or TAS incarnations, has nothing to offer us at this point but evasions and dishonesty. We can do better than that, and we should. Irfan Khawaja