Greybird

As of today, Part II has been announced, though with no details as yet, except for an imprecise date: Fall 2012, about six months later than John Aglialoro had first planned. Their Website — http://www.atlasshruggedpart2.com/

The same Rand who spent the better part of a dozen years either rewriting, or hectoring him into revising, The Ominous Parallels? Not at all likely. I wasn't thinking about matters of style, which are relatively unimportant. I was referring to the various positions that Peikoff has taken on matters of substance. Nor was I thinking primarily about matters of style. (Why would you think that I was? I talked about rewriting, period, without differentiating those two factors.) As it happens, I do seriously doubt that Rand would have protracted the writing and publishing process that long for "the first Objectivist philosopher other than myself" if she didn't have notable differences with Peikoff on matters of substance. That is, if the Brandens' accounts are to be given credence, where Rand was frequently impatient with Peikoff about such matters — in philosophic reasoning, rather than historical facts. Rand was undoubtedly also concerned with style, and given the plodding Peikovian prose that came out in Parallels, any attention of hers to that must have had little effect. (OPAR flowed considerably better.) But that clearly wasn't enough to push Peikoff's book among three publishers (and, probably, three spent advances) over 13 years, from 1968 to 1981. Not when she wanted to see her one remaining protégé get into commercial print.

The same Rand who spent the better part of a dozen years either rewriting, or hectoring him into revising, The Ominous Parallels? Not at all likely.

And the Atlas Society Objectivists chose — as did, and do, many people in this forum — to misrepresent, insult, and smear the above messenger. The blame goes all around, Shayne. Oh, and for the record, I agree with 110 percent of what Paul says. The extra ten percent involves his not being quite forceful or pointed enough about it. (Partly due to the five-minute House-speech time limit. Nonetheless, he covers a lot of ground.) His son, though, is doing beautifully in that rhetorical respect, utterly skewering Harry Reid's lily-livered hypocrisy about the Fourth Amendment on the floor of the Senate today. Not that the cowards around him listened.

After posting the above, I saw that Brant had revived the entire previous "Open"/"Closed" thread, which had my more detailed discussion of these points about reification and brand names, reposted from over a decade ago on the Atlantis (I) list.

I hold to certain philosophic ideas. But I don't have "a philosophy" sitting there in my head, as a distinct and integrated entity, identifiable even if not written down as yet. Neither do you. Neither did Rand. Not one that encompasses all of existence. We humans reify. It's far less complex and far more convenient to talk about "a philosophy" as one entity, rather than ten thousand individual observations or thoughts — some succeeding in being integrated into broader structures, many only partially succeeding, most not at all. Yet labeling or talking about "a philosophy" as an entity does not create one. One can claim to do that, and Rand certainly did, but establishing this to be so? That vastly increases in its complexity and in the necessary standard of proof as the philosophic scope increases. That Rand claimed universal applicability and validity didn't make it happen. She admitted, in a massive understatement, to not fleshing it out fully herself. It hasn't happened yet, and it almost certainly never will. Not to defend "her philosophy." Attention will eventually be paid, no longer primarily to "Objectivism," but to what is objectively valid. At a mere 30 years after Rand's passing, with her legal heir still abusing her written legacy, and his opponents not deeply challenging but primarily reacting to that, including David Kelley? We're not past the cult-of-personality stage yet. Until we stop talking about "a philosophy," we never will be.

Although that's widespread on its own, the worse assumptions are far deeper than that, far more misleading, far more destructive, and are to be laid wholly at Rand's own feet. These lie in assuming that "Objectivism," as such, makes genuine sense as a proper noun, and that Rand's talking about "my philosophy" has a coherent referent. As I've pointed out on many occasions, these are both fallacies. When the proper noun at the root of the controversy is deficient, the adjectives coming from it are deficient, and nothing good will come from wielding them — on any side. The only sane procedure. It won't be followed to any substantial degree, though, until nobody has a vested personal interest in blindly defending — or making apologetics for — Rand herself. Or, more precisely, when the state of affairs comes about that my friend Rob Morse predicted in 1978, his emphasis: "Nobody will be sane about this until Ayn Rand, and everyone who has ever known her personally, is dead." Which still is not yet the case. That's the heart of the matter. But until the proper noun and adjective vanish from discourse, few will realize this. Such is the reifying, misleading, pernicious power of an "-ism," any "-ism," even one coined by Rand's own best intentions.

One Big-Pharma Corporatist out (Mitch Daniels, former Lilly executive), one in. The players may change, but never the roles.

Because they, not Washington, control a military behemoth larger than every other such establishment on the planet combined. Yeah, right. If this isn't Invincible Ignorance, I don't know what is. You have more brazen balls than Leonard "Nuke Tehran" Peikoff.

"The one" what? The latest pliable, somewhat photogenic neocon to come out of Texas with his own ideas for social and cultural engineering, disguised as "upholding Uh-mehr-rick-kan values"? That's what he is, but that's not what it appears you're talking about. And admit it: Rush Limbaugh would endorse a head of cabbage if it would promise to preserve the Empire.

Save your time, and do something far more interesting than rummaging through the locker on a lovely Saturday — the Lexicon is on line. Complete with libertarian-trashing. For newcomers, don't give the supercilious BinswangerTwit any more royalties, I beg of you. (I'll always remember the shabbily printed hardcover edition, long since sold to one of those oh-so-horrid libertarians at the Karl Hess [supper] Club, for its using a paper stock of the texture, thickness, and color of East German toilet paper. And, yes, I actually used East German toilet paper.)

Since it does not involve an imminent danger to the continuation of one's life, where one cannot give active consent (such as when one is unconscious), only one question is relevant here: Can the subject of such elective surgery give informed consent? The answer at that age, obviously, is "No." This is one of the extremely rare cases where I believe such a legislative action is justifiable. (Not that it wouldn't be better handled through informed, rational, and private medical / ethical decision-making. The initiative process is a blunt, easily-abused instrument.) It is forced genital mutilation, and parents do not have the right to do this without their son's informed consent. Past customs or religious rites are not legitimate excuses.

His colleagues of three decades at the Orange County Register posted a tribute today. Difficulties with the Net, traffic, clients, and gas prices shrink noticeably in importance when something like this happens. I'm glad I could finally meet him in person last Spring at a local libertarian supper club, to thank him for many years of stellar and accessible words in the cause of human freedom.

Say what? Where's Ralph Waldo Emerson when we need him? I couldn't resist noting the irony of Rand's demurral with the original poster's point, even though she quotes Emerson (in "Self-Reliance") out of proper context. (As denoted by the actual sentence, "A foolish consistency [...]")

Richard Rorty as a doctoral advisor to an Objectivist is a pretty odd combination indeed. No more odd than Barbara Branden studying for her degrees under Sidney Hook at NYU. If one insists on working only with like-minded professors, one ought to just avoid academe entirely in the first place. A hallmark of an enlightened thinker used to be that he or she could respect someone with well-founded differences of opinion, even when that person was one's mentoree or student. I've seem that attitude diminishing markedly from Hook's day, to Rorty's, to my own college experience, to the present.

Nope. You want some statement that's less "flip"? I'm not sure that anyone asserting a metaphor of a "good ship America" — with collectivist premises of being trapped below decks by "defeatism," and an identification of individuals with "their" government, consensually supported or not — even deserves one. Yet I'll oblige you anyway, because I can't get to sleep yet: The story cited shows so many of the faults of the mass-man (A.J. Nock's term) mentality, in one convenient news item, as to make it almost impossible to tabulate them. Here are only a few of the items of groupthink. ~ That a private business's choices, whether intended or not, are pertinent to and should be reported to the police. ~ That anything, period, not involving the imminent use of force is any of the business of the police. ~ That a temporal coincidence creates causation, especially in a political sense. ~ That a business's management, knowing the jingoistic (I'm not about to dirty the manager's word, "patriotic") tendencies of those around them, would be so stupid as to deliberately infuriate potential and future customers. ~ That the flag displayed is worthy of exaggerated reverence, to the point of personal trauma at such obeisance allegedly not being given by the hotel management. ~ That every such establishment hangs on the words of "our leaders" with sufficient attention as to avoid even the possibility of inadvertent offense, to the detriment of attention being paid to actually running the business. All of this is indicative of the unreflective mindset that comes from what at least 90 percent of the residents of that city have experienced, as with everywhere else in this country — the holding pens / prison yards / State-pep-rally venues known as the compulsorily attended government schools. This anecdote gives ample evidence that the habits of obedience, even to the tattered symbols of authority, are so entrenched as to make it impossible, in any short historical time frame, to modify them. Even to divert such people from supporting imminent personal, privacy, and fiscal disasters from State policies, let alone to rebuild any semblance of respect for genuine individual liberty. Is there any hope, in the historical near term, to get enough people among the unreflective and the (properly) job- and family-attentive to transcend any of the fallacies listed above? So that they won't indulge in such reflex actions of stupidity? And so that those running a peaceful private business don't have to add flaming, absurd ignorance to the burdens of the regulatory and taxation Leviathan that already threatens to bankrupt and criminalize their every action? Only one answer that doesn't end up hopelessly over-optimistic, to the point of being inane or insane or both, is possible to those questions: Nope.

Nope.

So the ones who want individuals judged for their individual behavior, according to at least an attempt at objective standards of evidence and law, are the tribalists? The ones who don't admire a mob hit are "huge admirers of authority"? You're making no sense here. In any event, I disrupt your observation by noting that I, the anarcho-capitalist who detests authority, am among those who wanted bin Laden (and anyone else) to have a trial. Even Adolf Eichmann, with ten-thousand-fold more blood on his hands than bin Laden, got a trial.

You wish. Vile words. Forked tongue. [... link to comments of similar caliber omitted] I never thought that the even-tempered, judicious Steve Boydstun would be reduced to spluttering (and mistaken) rage, and imputing attitudes to others without justification, but that's what has happened. Nonetheless, I forge onward: LM's description of the Islamist attitude matches everything I've seen in veracious reporting. (Not in the neocons' narrative of a self-contradictory and incoherent "Islamofascism," but that's their fever dream for justifying perpetual war, and not an argument.) I see, and have seen, no "hatred for our freedoms," despite Dubya's fantasies. I see a great deal of contempt for hypocrisy and for the neocons' imperial project, both of which long pre-date the Imperium that began in earnest with the Cold War. That "they" are not justified in a murderous response to it does not alter "our" having begun it, mostly for motives of oil and other resources, only recently with humanitarian glosses sometimes given to it. Beyond the historical record, though, how have "we," those beset by a welfare and warfare State that few of us have explicitly endorsed (other than accepting benefits), not "lost" the putative War on Terror already? With domestic surveillance, militarized police, capital controls, movement restrictions, internal passports through DMVs, sexual molestation and radiation damage at airports, and Stasi-informer attitudes encouraged at every turn? All of this in addition to a gutting of any last tiny vestiges of reluctance, in the military's culture, to applying blunt force without clearly stated purposes? That the U.S. authorities are busily throwing away any shreds of the dollar's value merely ices this cake. Where I would differ with LM is that the contempt cast upon U.S. government-and-elite hypocrisy has merely been given a bigger, "celebrity" focus with bin Laden's and others' being targeted for assassination. The contempt and outrage over the grinding, punishing slaughter of ten, fifteen, a hundred at a time, mostly civilians, has been fueled by and been shown on incessant worldwide news coverage that is given almost no play on this continent, allowing "us" to pretend it does not exist. As it has always been, the only way to a "winning" move in any such war that proceeds without principles, limits, shame, or perspective is the same one given by the perspicacious war-waging computer in "WarGames." And that is, quite simply, not to play. Tend to the task of actually defending this physical land and those who inhabit it, and forget about projecting power. Few of us will learn it, of course, as few in any Empire ever do, until the self-generated destruction rains down fully upon their own heads.

The Amazon preview includes Rand's introduction with the letter from a student, identified as G.M.B. from Northern Illinois. That's our Harry Lime lookalike Jerry Biggers? Jerry (Gerald) confirmed this to me in person in 1978. I had thought the original introduction was omitted or redacted, but I was mistaken. Schwartz renamed the book, added an introduction and three articles of his own, rearranged the order of Rand's ten pieces to suit his polemical tastes, and included two more Rand essays, without offering any real logical justification: "Racism," originally in The Virtue of Selfishness, and "Global Balkanization," a Ford Hall Forum speech printed in The Voice of Reason (itself polluted by Schwartz's libelous screeching about libertarians). Perhaps it made for a more salable package in the '90s. If Schwartz's turgid analyses didn't put potential or actual buyers to sleep, that is. Yet he pretended it was still her anthology, and treated the order she chose as being unimportant. Which it is not, as she drew broader conclusions and made more fundamental analyses as the essays progressed, showing how political actions depended on broader issues of ethics and epistemology. Rand's own secondary emphasis, in selection and polemical aim, on the gutting of education is also diminished. Hijacking it (and the posthumous anthology) to print Schwartz's own material, and decoupling her title's linkage of politics and environmentalism — a partly inaccurate one in the essays' details, I contend, but it's what she wrote — is still parasitical.

We Norteamericanos shouldn't be so proud of avoiding "barbarian level" treatments in this respect. Some state-level statutes punishing witchcraft were on the books, at least formally, until the mid-19th Century. And of course, with extra-judicial assassinations and approbation of torture, we're returning to the very actions used against those nonconformists in Salem nearly four centuries ago. Arthur Miller, with "The Crucible," was as prescient (and frightening) as was Orwell. Not on my library shelf, for one, it's not! I've never shelled out for the insipid reworking of that anthology (and its title) by the sniveling, parasitical nitwittery of Peter Schwartz, and I never will. Rand's own original — complete with the letter to her that inspired it, by user Jerry Biggers of this site — is still more than good enough.

Please stop it. I signed up at this site with "Greybird" because I'd been using it all over the Net for years. I don't want to have MSK change it, not with over 700 posts having been made here under that name. My name is displayed here, here, and here. I'm not hiding it. I'm damned tired of this insinuation that I'm hiding it, or that I don't stand behind what I write. As for your "Semper fi," it appears you actually do want a Crusade. Fine. Do it on your own time and your own resources, if any private outfit of mercenaries or gang of Mob hit men (not a government outfit of same, like the Marines or Navy Seals) will have you.

I see an inability on your part to distinguish between venting and persuasion.

Anyone who thinks that an event like this is worth "celebration" — or anything emotionally stronger than mild relief that a possibly necessary task, of preventing yet more bloodshed, was dealt with long after it should have been — is beyond my ability to persuade. So I won't try. I'm not regretting he's dead. (If, on this latest of about ten proclamations, he actually is dead.) I'm disgusted at how all context is dropped for the sake of blood fervor that ends up supporting the State and its machinery. By alleged Objectivists, yet. (And it's ten times worse on Facebook. Even the makers of the Atlas movie are descending into mindless jingoism.) So, please, remain pissed off at me for interfering with your "celebration." Get your vehemence rolling. I've long ago accepted the occasional role of heaving a few dead cats of reality into the sanctuary of righteous vengeance.

I say we contemplate the State-worship involved in blindly praising an assassination. I say we consider that getting what "we," our imperial instrumentalities, "want" may be far from an unalloyed virtue. I say we think about how many lives have been lost, dreams shattered, limbs severed, treasures squandered — in trying to control these countries, in their blowing the winds back upon us, in pushing the whirlwind toward them again, all while increasing the powers we grant the State on each go-round. I say that we refrain from acting like the who formed a mob last night in front of the White House.I say we consider whether we want to submit to continuing to have our phones tapped and our children molested, all to keep up this Crusade. I say all this knowing that because I'm raining on their Happy Dance, Kat or Michael may well decide to put me on moderation again. I really don't give a damn any more.