Rationally Selfish: "The Morality of Selling Your Body" by Dr. Diana Hsieh

[George H. Smith]

Hsieh likes porn, but only "artsy" porn, of course.

I eagerly await Hsieh's comments on "The Morality of Selling Your Soul."

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

Here is my personal take on Hsieh's video, one based on other videos I have watched by her as well.

Hsieh is a highly intelligent woman who has interesting things to say. She is the type of person I would normally like, despite her affiliation with ARI, but her public backstabbing of Chris Sciabarra made this impossible for me.

Hsieh seems to get especially nervous when she ventures into territory that might lead her to dissent from Peikovian orthodoxy. She does precisely this at several points in this video, especially near the end when she discusses porn.

Hsieh is much too intelligent to swallow the entire Peikovian Pill. On some level, she surely understands how crazy some of it is. This will cause her problems in the future, if it hasn't already. Despite her public demeanor from time to time, Hsieh is not a robotic Randian. I think she will find that she can bite her tongue only for so long before she loses more than blood.

Ghs

Addendum: Around a year ago, I wrote:

I find Hsieh quite attractive. Her intelligence and Machiavellian psychology give her an edgy "bad girl" quality. My kind of woman.

I stand by my remark.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I don't believe I just watched this.

I want to say something intelligent, but Hsieh's discussion is irrelevant from where my understanding is at right now. So I don't have much of an opinion on any of her points. Also, I don't have time to lay out my ideas from the ground up.

Here's a brief start. People like Hsieh--who try to present themselves as moral philosophers and tell people what they should and should not do--treat the human mind as a single-level "garbage in garbage out" organ--OK, OK, "good thinking in good thinking out" organ--with a subconscious basement they vaguely allude to (and grudgingly acknowledge) in phrases like "psychological damage."

I find that view of the human mind woefully incomplete. Granted, sometimes with these people I get glimpses of lip service to a better understanding, but when they start making up rules (or defending rules others have made up), their default is always this unfocused identification of the mind.

I speak, of course, to what I have read and heard. Maybe there is better stuff out there from these folks. I haven't seen it, though.

I am currently using the triune brain model (brain stem or "reptilian brain," limbic system or "neo-mammalian brain," and neocortex) as a frame for my thoughts on epistemology and values. It is not biologically accurate in some important details, but as a virtual model for organizing the mental landscape, especially if you allow for some fuzziness in the boundaries, it is surprisingly effective when you get into designing systems that work and don't work--both for self-control and for managing people.

For those who are not familiar with the three divisions, the lizard brain deals with basic body functions like breathing, where the fight-flight response begins, basic sex drive, sense of territory and things like that. The limbic system deals with emotions, relationships with others (alpha, beta and stuff like that), and the neocortex deals with abstractions, math, language, etc. This is really oversimplified, but it is a brief overview.

I could not discuss the morality of selling your body without reference to this. Let's look at just one item on the menu that Hsieh discussed.

Here is a real-life example of what happens with a sperm donor (a clip from Style Network's documentary on the same topic). See if there are any clear-cut shoulds and should-nots here.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oK1s1LM1Hno?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The lady's reaction to the dude's large quantity of artificially produced offspring is pure lizard brain. There is no morality on earth--no way to tell her that the man was perfectly within his rights, yada yada yada--that is going to change her revolt and contained shudder, nor her "picking at the wound" to find out more as she gradually starts hating the guy on a very deep level.

This is not even taking into account what the guy's kids are going to feel when it finally dawns on them that he masturbated for them to be born. I see lizard turning into Godzilla there, at least in some of the cases.

But the guy didn't harm anyone--at least he had no idea that he would--and he did something perfectly accepted within society.

So is it moral or immoral to be a sperm donor?

I say, who the hell knows? And why does it matter to have one rule, anyway? Even one qualified by "context"?

Or, to be more clear, for the neocortex thinking in individualism-oriented principles, you could say it is perfectly moral. But for the lizard brain, it is total disaster.

No matter what you conclude about the basic good or evil of being a sperm donor, I don't see that affecting the outcome to the lizard brain or providing any kind of relevant "code of values to guide man's choices" if you get misery in one part of the brain and approval in the other.

I could go into every other issue Hsieh discussed in a similar manner. The simple fact is that you cannot deduce reality from principles. It works the other way around. You have to induce principles from observing reality, then test them for consistency and applicability to other things.

And it all starts with identification.

If you don't properly identify the human mind, most of the rules you make up for it to obey will be arbitrary. If some rules work better than others (like in the different religions), it's because these rules have shown to produce certain results by trial and error over mankind's history. Argument from authority coupled with traditionally held views and results is about as much identification of the mind as you are going to get using that method.

Unfortunately, I see this happening in Objectivism.

This is just one example of why I don't have any view on Hsieh's comments other than to say they are irrelevant to the issue according to my understanding and study.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Addendum: Around a year ago, I wrote:

I find Hsieh quite attractive. Her intelligence and Machiavellian psychology give her an edgy "bad girl" quality. My kind of woman.

I stand by my remark.

Now there's the lizard brain in action if I ever saw one.

Michael

[George H. Smith]

Addendum: Around a year ago, I wrote:

I find Hsieh quite attractive. Her intelligence and Machiavellian psychology give her an edgy "bad girl" quality. My kind of woman.

I stand by my remark.

Now there's the lizard brain in action if I ever saw one.

Michael

I wasn't sure what "Lizard Brain" means, so I looked it up on the world's most authoritative source of knowledge -- YouTube.

I'm afraid I don't see the connection.

Ghs

Michael: I posted this before I read your earlier post.

[Xray]

If wish the interviewer had asked Hsieh: "I suppose your 'I can't condemn something I'm actually enjoying' would be labeled as a mere subjective "whim" in Objectivism?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

George,

The lizard brain is not the amygdala. The guy who made the video screwed up. The amygdala is part of the limbic system (see here).

I've seen that video before. It's a shame he screwed up. The video is really cute.

Here's a quick explanation by example. If your lizard brain could talk, when you saw something, it would ask questions like:

Can I eat it?

Should I run from it?

Do I have to stand and fight and kill it?

Can I hump it?

Can I ignore it?

Michael

[George H. Smith]

George, The lizard brain is not the amygdala. The guy who made the video screwed up. The amygdala is part of the limbic system (see here). I've seen that video before. It's a shame he screwed up. The video is really cute. Here's a quick explanation by example. If your lizard brain could talk, when you saw something, it would ask questions like: Can I eat it? Should I run from it? Do I have to stand and fight and kill it? Can I hump it? Can I ignore it? Michael

Four out of five of those questions have occurred to me in regard to Hsieh, so I guess your Lizard Brain comment was pretty much on target. 8-)

Ghs

[Dennis Hardin]

George,

I regard Hsieh as a wannabe intellectual guru who uses moral authority as a weapon for personal power. I don’t find power-lust in any form attractive at all.

I’m sure you are aware that Hsieh worked with both Nathaniel Branden and David Kelley for many years, but now condemns both of them. Newcomers to Rand often fall victim to such orthodoxy before they progress beyond the stage of unthinking idolatry, but Hsieh obviously doesn’t have that excuse. For whatever reasons, she is choosing to be stupid and, like Branden, I don’t admire it.

Take this blog post as one example:

Nathaniel Branden vs Objectivism

I would endorse all of Branden’s insights here. He is not, as she implies, distancing himself from the Objectivist ethics, but rather raising important questions. These issues need to be addressed in a serious way, but Hsieh condemns Branden as irredeemably “evil” for voicing them. For her to acknowledge Branden’s insights would amount to diluting her phony, self-appointed moral authority by allowing for the fact that we often do not know why people think and act the way they do.

Her views on pornography are pretty much identical to opinions Peikoff has expressed.

Do you disagree with Ayn Rand on pornography?

This podcast in December of 2010 was a follow-up to prior questions he answered regarding porn in February of 2009 and November of 2010, in which he acknowledged that pornography could serve a rational purpose (He says: “I basically said that to shock ‘Objectivist puritans.’ “) He openly struggles with the question in a manner almost identical to Hsieh, saying that he is ‘mixed’ on the issue of whether or not the people who make pornography can be rational or moral.

Hsieh also condemns “stripping” because it appeals to “brutish, crude desires” in men, while holding out the possibility that there might be a context in which a woman could do it and be rational. Since when is the male sexual response to the female body “brutish and crude?” Paraphrasing Rand on feminism: The complaint made by some women that strippers arouse “brutish and crude” desires in men typically comes from females who have no such problem.

[Brant Gaede]

It's lobotomy time.

--Brant

donate it to science

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Question from a perplexed soul.

Why is enjoying "artsy" pornography un-condemnable, but enjoying a striptease results in brutish and crude desires?

Doesn't "artsy" porn arouse brutish and crude desires?

Hell, it should if it's competently made.

But you don't even have to go to porn. Doesn't Ayn Rand's rough sex scenes qualify as brutish and crude desires? You know, bruises and biting until the bleeding starts and stuff like that?

Sounds brutish and crude to me.

Now here's the kicker.

Do you really have to take a striptease all the way into explicit sex--albeit "artsy"--in order to make it un-condemnable?

Hmmm...

I don't get it.

I can't find the standard.

And my lizard brain is turning into a pretzeled snake trying to figure it all out...

Michael

[Philip Coates]

> She is the type of person I would normally like, despite her affiliation with ARI, but her public backstabbing of Chris Sciabarra made this impossible for me. [GHS, post #2]

I agree. That incident was what set me off on her. I didn't have so much of a problem with her philosophical mistakes, but that was close to a character flaw if one is able to see what is wrong. Vicious and mean-spirited in that regard.

> I find Hsieh quite attractive. Her intelligence and Machiavellian psychology give her an edgy "bad girl" quality. My kind of woman.

On the first point, I don't find her attractive at all and I completely disagree on the second sentence, which may be why I don't find her attractive once I have formed a better sense of her character and personality:

I tend to *strongly dislike* the edgy, bad girl and the 'machiavellian' types. Having lived in New York, I met quite enough of them and I prefer the kind, sweet, more benevolent, less paranoic type of woman.

I'd take the nice, well-adjusted, happy "earth mother" type over the neurotic, brittle genius every time.

[George H. Smith]

Question from a perplexed soul.

Why is enjoying "artsy" pornography un-condemnable, but enjoying a striptease results in brutish and crude desires?

To be fair, Hsieh characterizes her dislike of stripping as "completely personal." I think she may be imagining herself in that situation, and she cannot conceive of the job as being anything but "loathsome." I regard the job of collecting garbage as loathsome, in the sense that I cannot imagine myself doing it, but I certainly don't see anything wrong with the occupation per se.

I have mentioned before that my first wife worked as a stripper, so I spent many hours in strip clubs during the 1970s, mainly near LAX, talking to the other strippers, It was just a job for most of them; they did because the pay was phenomenally good for a relatively easy job and short hours. My wife could make more in a week (mainly from tips) working part-time than many women would make in a month full-time.

I don't get it.

I can't find the standard.

And my lizard brain is turning into a pretzeled snake trying to figure it all out...

I think you have identified the major problem in Hsieh's presentation, even if we take into account that she was speaking informally. Hsieh says repeatedly that the morality of X depends on the context, that particular decisions are judgment calls, and so forth. In the final analysis, the only standard involved is whether X will harm you physically and/or psychologically in the long run.

All this is true, of course, but it is so commonsensical and flexible that it strikes me as strangely un-Randian. Moreover, Hsieh doesn't deal with any of the fundamental metaethical issues, and one in particular: namely, whether Objectivism recognizes a sphere of morally indifferent actions. I am not speaking here of trivial matters, such as one's choice of ice-cream flavors, but of potentially significant choices, such as choosing a hazardous occupation. So far as I know, O'ists don't distinguish in any important sense between the moral and the prudential. The failure to draw this line can generate some theoretical problems when considering the issues discussed by Hsieh.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

The status of prudential merely means the level of risk you are comfortable with. You won't find me as a lumberjack or fishing off Alaska's shores. The crux of the matter I'd guess has to do with other people, say your family members. Does your level of risk taking become theirs too? And such a level changes over a lifetime. Doesn't morality really start where the other guy begins?

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

The status of prudential merely means the level of risk you are comfortable with. You won't find me as a lumberjack or fishing off Alaska's shores. The crux of the matter I'd guess has to do with other people, say your family members. Does your level of risk taking become theirs too? And such a level changes over a lifetime. Doesn't morality really start where the other guy begins?

--Brant

I would say that morality kicks in when we must refer to our fundamental values in order to decide what to do. My thinking on this subject was formed c. 1970, while I was taking a graduate seminar on ethics at the University of Arizona. (I was an undergraduate, but I got special permission to take a number of philosophy graduate seminars for credit.)

The subject was moral versus nonmoral actions, and the professor gave this example: Suppose I am attending a dinner in which peas are served, and for some reason I decide to eat my peas with a knife by balancing them on the blade. Would this qualify as an "immoral" action? No, according to the professor; my eating peas with a knife might be bad manners, but it would not be either moral or immoral. It would be nonmoral, or prudential.

I replied with a counter-example: Suppose I belong to an eccentric sect of Christianity that recognizes an 11th Commandment, viz., "Thou shalt never eat peas with a knife." In this case, I argued, to eat peas with a knife would be to disobey the express will of God, so my decision, from the perspective of the moral agent, would most certainly qualify as "immoral."

The professor conceded that I had made an interesting point, so he urged me to write my term paper on this subject. My essay of nearly 30 pages included the example of two guys who are deliberating on whether or not to go to a porn movie. The first guy is an atheist who has no qualms about porn, whereas the second guy is a devout Christian who believes that God does not approve of porn.

In the first case, I argued, the decision would be purely prudential. The atheist would ask himself questions like: Do I have the time? Do I want to spend the money? Is this movie any good? These are prudential rather than moral questions because they do not require the atheist to dig very deep into his hierarchy of values.

The Christian faces a different situation, however, because he will ask questions like: Should I disobey what I believe is the will of God? If I decide to go the movie, does this make me a bad person? Would I be committing a sin? These are moral rather than prudential questions because they involve the most fundamental values that a Christian can hold.

I have given this subject a lot more thought over the years, and I have even written a fair amount on it, but my original formulation conveys the essentials.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Moreover, Hsieh doesn't deal with any of the fundamental metaethical issues, and one in particular: namely, whether Objectivism recognizes a sphere of morally indifferent actions. I am not speaking here of trivial matters, such as one's choice of ice-cream flavors, but of potentially significant choices, such as choosing a hazardous occupation. So far as I know, O'ists don't distinguish in any important sense between the moral and the prudential. The failure to draw this line can generate some theoretical problems when considering the issues discussed by Hsieh.

George,

This reminds me of NB's observation about confusing reason with the reasonable (see "The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand".) I think morally neutral considerations lie in that direction.

But as I am interested in this stuff from the perspective of recent developments in neuroscience, neuropsychology, etc., let me share something with you where I believe traditional Objectivists totally go off the rails. There is a concept called "hot-cold empathy gap." According to a wonderful book I am currently reading (Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney), this gap is "the inability, during a cool, rational, peaceful moment, to appreciate how we’ll behave during the heat of passion and temptation."

Here is a more extended quote from the book:

We deal with gaps more like the one observed by a friend of ours who grew up on a commune in Canada. She was the only child on the commune, mostly consisting of idealistic hippies. Among their ideals was to consume only the healthiest and most natural forms of food. Her mother, however, thought that a child ought to have cookies from the supermarket every now and then. For buying them, the mother had to endure lots of jokes and lectures about the evils of sugar, the perils of fattening junk food, the immorality of supporting international food corporations. The mother kept buying them anyway but then faced another problem. The cookies kept disappearing. Late in the evening, after partaking of natural substances like wine and cannabis, the commune dwellers’ willpower was depleted, and their disapproval of corporate junk food was no match for their cravings for Oreos. Some parents have to hide cookies from their children; this mother found that her child was the only person to whom the location could be revealed. The cookies had to be hidden because the grown-ups suffered from the hot-cold empathy gap. They denounced junk food by day without realizing how much they’d want those evil cookies once they were tired and stoned.

In setting rules for how to behave in the future, you’re often in a calm, cool state, so you make unrealistic commitments. “It’s really easy to agree to diet when you’re not hungry,” says Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. And it’s really easy to be sexually abstemious when you’re not sexually aroused, as Loewenstein and Dan Ariely found by asking young heterosexual adult men some personal questions. If, say, they were attracted to a woman and she proposed a threesome with a man, would they do it? Could they imagine having sex with a woman who was forty years older? Could they ever be attracted to a twelve-year-old girl? To get a woman to have sex, would they falsely tell her they loved her? Would they keep trying after she said no? Would they try to get her drunk, or give her a drug to lower her resistance?

When the men answered these questions sitting by a computer in a laboratory—an eminently cold state—they honestly thought they would be quite unlikely ever to do any of those things. In another part of the experiment, however, the men were instructed to answer the questions while they were masturbating and in a state of high sexual arousal. In that hot state, they gave higher ratings to all those possibilities. What had seemed highly unlikely began to seem more within the realm of possibility. It was just an experiment, but it showed how the wilderness might find them out, too. Turn up the heat, and the unthinkable becomes surprisingly thinkable.

I think you could easily paraphrase this last sentence and have it hold true for many, many Objectivists: Turn up the heat, and the immoral becomes surprisingly moral.

In other words, the lizard brain will not be denied unless he is at rest. You may or may not act on what he wants, but if you don't, he will make your life hell during the "heat."

I never see this kind of thing discussed within the context of Objectivist morality.

To phrase this another way, our values can change drastically depending on the "heat" of the moment. And this includes some very important values.

Michael

[George H. Smith]

George,

I regard Hsieh as a wannabe intellectual guru who uses moral authority as a weapon for personal power. I don’t find power-lust in any form attractive at all.

I’m sure you are aware that Hsieh worked with both Nathaniel Branden and David Kelley for many years, but now condemns both of them. Newcomers to Rand often fall victim to such orthodoxy before they progress beyond the stage of unthinking idolatry, but Hsieh obviously doesn’t have that excuse. For whatever reasons, she is choosing to be stupid and, like Branden, I don’t admire it.

Take this blog post as one example:

Nathaniel Branden vs Objectivism

I would endorse all of Branden’s insights here. He is not, as she implies, distancing himself from the Objectivist ethics, but rather raising important questions. These issues need to be addressed in a serious way, but Hsieh condemns Branden as irredeemably “evil” for voicing them. For her to acknowledge Branden’s insights would amount to diluting her phony, self-appointed moral authority by allowing for the fact that we often do not know why people think and act the way they do.

Her views on pornography are pretty much identical to opinions Peikoff has expressed.

Do you disagree with Ayn Rand on pornography?

This podcast in December of 2010 was a follow-up to prior questions he answered regarding porn in February of 2009 and November of 2010, in which he acknowledged that pornography could serve a rational purpose (He says: “I basically said that to shock ‘Objectivist puritans.’ “) He openly struggles with the question in a manner almost identical to Hsieh, saying that he is ‘mixed’ on the issue of whether or not the people who make pornography can be rational or moral.

Hsieh also condemns “stripping” because it appeals to “brutish, crude desires” in men, while holding out the possibility that there might be a context in which a woman could do it and be rational. Since when is the male sexual response to the female body “brutish and crude?” Paraphrasing Rand on feminism: The complaint made by some women that strippers arouse “brutish and crude” desires in men typically comes from females who have no such problem.

Dennis,

You make some excellent points.

I knew nothing about Hsieh until I learned of the despicable stunt that she pulled with Chris Sciabarra, who had done nothing other than mentor and encourage her. This is still basically all I know about her in this regard. I didn't know anything about her former relationships with Branden and Kelley.

Please understand that I was half-joking when I said that I find Hsieh attractive. She reminds me very much of another woman, who shall remain anonymous , with whom I was involved for ten years. In fact, in the same post from which I quoted earlier, I compared Hsieh to a Black Widow spider. See:

http://www.objectivi...ndpost&p=113811

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

I regard Hsieh as a wannabe intellectual guru who uses moral authority as a weapon for personal power. I don’t find power-lust in any form attractive at all.

In my headline post (the one with the video), I originally included a comment that I decided to delete, since I thought it might strike readers as a little odd. But it now seems more appropriate, given your remark, so here it is:

The titles of Hsieh's vidoes list her as "Dr. Diana Hsieh." I don't wish to make a big deal of this, but I find this annoying. A number of her videos deal with psychological issues, such as the fear of death, and the "Dr." conveys the impression that Hsieh has some kind of psychological expertise. People with a PhD in philosophy don't normally call themselves "Dr." (In Hsieh's defense, I should note that the YouTube blurbs describe her as "Philosopher Dr. Diana Hsieh.")

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

The status of prudential merely means the level of risk you are comfortable with. You won't find me as a lumberjack or fishing off Alaska's shores. The crux of the matter I'd guess has to do with other people, say your family members. Does your level of risk taking become theirs too? And such a level changes over a lifetime. Doesn't morality really start where the other guy begins?

--Brant

I would say that morality kicks in when we must refer to our fundamental values in order to decide what to do. My thinking on this subject was formed c. 1970, while I was taking a graduate seminar on ethics at the University of Arizona. (I was an undergraduate, but I got special permission to take a number of philosophy graduate seminars for credit.)

The subject was moral versus nonmoral actions, and the professor gave this example: Suppose I am attending a dinner in which peas are served, and for some reason I decide to eat my peas with a knife by balancing them on the blade. Would this qualify as an "immoral" action? No, according to the professor; my eating peas with a knife might be bad manners, but it would not be either moral or immoral. It would be nonmoral, or prudential.

I replied with a counter-example: Suppose I belong to an eccentric sect of Christianity that recognizes an 11th Commandment, viz., "Thou shalt never eat peas with a knife." In this case, I argued, to eat peas with a knife would be to disobey the express will of God, so my decision, from the perspective of the moral agent, would most certainly qualify as "immoral."

The professor conceded that I had made an interesting point, so he urged me to write my term paper on this subject. My essay of nearly 30 pages included the example of two guys who are deliberating on whether or not to go to a porn movie. The first guy is an atheist who has no qualms about porn, whereas the second guy is a devout Christian who believes that God does not approve of porn.

In the first case, I argued, the decision would be purely prudential. The atheist would ask himself questions like: Do I have the time? Do I want to spend the money? Is this movie any good? These are prudential rather than moral questions because they do not require the atheist to dig very deep into his hierarchy of values.

The Christian faces a different situation, however, because he will ask questions like: Should I disobey what I believe is the will of God? If I decide to go the movie, does this make me a bad person? Would I be committing a sin? These are moral rather than prudential questions because they involve the most fundamental values that a Christian can hold.

I have given this subject a lot more thought over the years, and I have even written a fair amount on it, but my original formulation conveys the essentials.

Ghs

Yes, of course, but without "the other guy" do we even start to think about this subject?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Please understand that I was half-joking when I said that I find Hsieh attractive. She reminds me very much of another woman, who shall remain anonymous , with whom I was involved for ten years.

George,

Oh no you don't.

You don't get off that easy.

Half-joking my foot.

You have a capacity to choose 'em almost as piss-poor as mine (excepting Kat, of course, and getting her makes me believe in blind luck).

Michael

[George H. Smith]

Yes, of course, but without "the other guy" do we even start to think about this subject?

--Brant

Suppose a modern Robinson Crusoe is a member of PETA and a fervent believer in animal rights. If, while stranded on an island, this Crusoe has no choice but to kill animals in order to survive, then this will be a moral dilemma for him, for the reasons I explained previously.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

Please understand that I was half-joking when I said that I find Hsieh attractive. She reminds me very much of another woman, who shall remain anonymous , with whom I was involved for ten years.

George,

Oh no you don't.

You don't get off that easy.

Half-joking my foot.

You have a capacity to choose 'em almost as piss-poor as mine (excepting Kat, of course, and getting her makes me believe in blind luck).

Michael

Good move, Michael! Your final remark should earn you a very special treat in the near future.

Btw, how do you get the regular smiley face to appear? When I click on it (in the top bar), only one option appears in the bottom bar, viz., the smirky face with sunglasses.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

George,

I just type a colon immediately followed by the close parentheses sign.

Here it is in the code box:

And here it is without the code tags (which produce the code box and does not allow code to run). Without the code box, the forum program automatically transforms it into a smiley.

Michael

EDIT: I just figured something out. If you click the smiley on the toolbar, it opens a bunch of emoticons BELOW the post, but they are kind of scrunched together. There is also a command "show all" you can click. This opens a dialog box with a bunch of emoticons in it.

[studiodekadent]

I'm not sure what to psychologically make of Hseih. If GHS is correct in his speculations (that she knows on some level the orthodoxy is flawed), then Hseih must have gone with ARI for career reasons.

But for some reason... I'm not so sure. I remember a post of hers on the blog where she talked about, after she read Passion, (paraphrasing) "dealing with the fact Ayn Rand might not have liked me." She talked about struggling with these feelings in her dorm room. She speaks about it like Passion gave her a religious crisis.

It seems like the impetus for Hseih was the same as the impetus for Peikoff: retaliation against those that defame The Goddess.

[George H. Smith]

George,

I just type a colon immediately followed by the close parentheses sign.

Here it is in the code box:

And here it is without the code tags (which produce the code box and does not allow code to run). Without the code box, the forum program automatically transforms it into a smiley.

Michael

EDIT: I just figured something out. If you click the smiley on the toolbar, it opens a bunch of emoticons BELOW the post, but they are kind of scrunched together. There is also a command "show all" you can click. This opens a dialog box with a bunch of emoticons in it.

Yeah, the "show all" works. I also noticed arrows at the ends of the lower bar. Clicking on those brings up other emoticons as well.

Thanks.

Ghs