Peikoff on date rape

[9thdoctor]

I'll say it again: would-be Objectivish scholars and thinkers would impress me more if they spent a little bit of time solving the dilemma of how to finance government in a free society,

[...]

What a cluster fuck. What a pissing away of Rand's legacy.

Now just a cotton pickin’ minute. Are you saying that Peikoff’s howlers should go unreported? Not be discussed here in Rand-land? I did a thread on Government Finance, and it ran its course fairly quick. Peikoff howlers get attention, and some good dialogue invariably follows. It's no exaggeration to say we thrive on Peikoff howlers here! In fact, if I ever got the chance, here's what I'd say:

[Dennis Hardin]

I'll say it again: would-be Objectivish scholars and thinkers would impress me more if they spent a little bit of time solving the dilemma of how to finance government in a free society, how to structure an Objectivist legal system, how to move from a welfare state to a society based on individual rights, maybe writing a book that someone other than their close family might read, etc.

These are some of the important issues identified by Ayn Rand (remember her?) in the 60's, but apparently they are unworthy of attention.

A great deal of valuable work on the nuts and bolts of downsizing government has been done by libertarian think tanks such as The Cato Institute.

Many of these topics are also addressed by George Reisman in his magum opus, Capitalism.

As I see it, that's the easy stuff. My own view is that Objectivists must focus much more on the cultural preconditions of laissez-faire capitalism; i.e., the ethics of rational self-inerest. Until the ethical roadblock of altruism is permanently removed and people begin to fully appreciate the moral importance of each person's responsibility for their own happiness, Americans are unlikely to care about the practical aspects of selling the sidewalks.

Instead, we have the likes of DH and Piekoff answering questions on the morality of pasta salad and whether (in Selene's apt and delightful turn of the phrase), the first 5 inches are "consensual", and, of course, other such stirring issues of the day--all while a secondary group of moral cowards blog and explain and await a time when they can freely speak their minds without fear of purges--a bunch of Peter Keatings who have read The Fountainhead and AS, and almost nothing more.

What a cluster fuck. What a pissing away of Rand's legacy.

It's called power lust. One of the truly noble characteristics of Ayn Rand--and something which distinguishes her from many of her disciples--was that she had no wish to control others. She was genuinely selfish in that regard--all her motivation as a writer derived from her wish to create the kind of universe she wanted to live in. As a consequence, she did more to help people improve their lives than the Albert Schweitzer's of the world could ever dream of doing. Meanwhile, Pope Lenny and Comrade Sonia selflessly dedicate themselves to "changing the world" like preachers who thrive on the power of the pulpit, when they ought to be telling their pathetic flock to grow up and think for themselves.

[BaalChatzaf]

It's called power lust. One of the truly noble characteristics of Ayn Rand--and something which distinguishes her from many of her disciples--was that she had no wish to control others.

Didn't Rand browbeat others with regard to their aesthetic preferences? And how is being a den-mother to somewhat troubled folks not controlling them, even to a slight extent?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

Dennis H.

You are predominantly correct about Ayn's focus. However, she did submit to the purge methodology, excommunicating folks that argued different points of view and severed relationships that were not willing to be in mental lockstep with her.

This behavior was pre and post split.

Adam

[Dennis Hardin]

... But part of [Rand's] legacy was the exclusiveness of her thought. It was she who declared that everybody except herself and those she designated could not be Objectivists but only students. And students must perforce look for guidance to their teachers.

Well, technically, it was Nathaniel Branden who said that, with Rand's blessing, no doubt. (Branden, of course, changed his mind about that issue following their break.) In Rand's defense, she knew that many of her "admirers" did not really understand her message, and needed to spend more time studying her works before putting their words into her mouth. It was a perfectly legitimate request for her to make at that particular stage of Objectivism's growth as a radical new philosophy.

I came across a poster on OO who weighed in on the shopping cart return debate saying, "I have opinions about everything." I thought, that poor boy. He must be exhausted, not to mention those who are favoured with the exposition of his opinions. But is it not the essence of Rand's thought, that everything in life must be subjected to rational analysis and ultimately judgment?

With apologies to Thomas Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of (human) survival.

[caroljane]

... But part of [Rand's] legacy was the exclusiveness of her thought. It was she who declared that everybody except herself and those she designated could not be Objectivists but only students. And students must perforce look for guidance to their teachers.

Well, technically, it was Nathaniel Branden who said that, with Rand's blessing, no doubt. (Branden, of course, changed his mind about that issue following their break.) In Rand's defense, she knew that many of her "admirers" did not really understand her message, and needed to spend more time studying her works before putting their words into her mouth. It was a perfectly legitimate request for her to make at that particular stage of Objectivism's growth as a radical new philosophy.

I came across a poster on OO who weighed in on the shopping cart return debate saying, "I have opinions about everything." I thought, that poor boy. He must be exhausted, not to mention those who are favoured with the exposition of his opinions. But is it not the essence of Rand's thought, that everything in life must be subjected to rational analysis and ultimately judgment?

With apologies to Thomas Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of (human) survival.

... But part of [Rand's] legacy was the exclusiveness of her thought. It was she who declared that everybody except herself and those she designated could not be Objectivists but only students. And students must perforce look for guidance to their teachers.

Well, technically, it was Nathaniel Branden who said that, with Rand's blessing, no doubt. (Branden, of course, changed his mind about that issue following their break.) In Rand's defense, she knew that many of her "admirers" did not really understand her message, and needed to spend more time studying her works before putting their words into her mouth. It was a perfectly legitimate request for her to make at that particular stage of Objectivism's growth as a radical new philosophy.

I came across a poster on OO who weighed in on the shopping cart return debate saying, "I have opinions about everything." I thought, that poor boy. He must be exhausted, not to mention those who are favoured with the exposition of his opinions. But is it not the essence of Rand's thought, that everything in life must be subjected to rational analysis and ultimately judgment?

With apologies to Thomas Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of (human) survival.

With apologies to Jefferson, eternal judgmental vigilance on everything which is presented to one's consciousness during the course of one 21st century day, is the price of insanity.

[Dennis Hardin]

It's called power lust. One of the truly noble characteristics of Ayn Rand--and something which distinguishes her from many of her disciples--was that she had no wish to control others.

Didn't Rand browbeat others with regard to their aesthetic preferences? And how is being a den-mother to somewhat troubled folks not controlling them, even to a slight extent?

Ba'al Chatzaf

Dennis H.

You are predominantly correct about Ayn's focus. However, she did submit to the purge methodology, excommunicating folks that argued different points of view and severed relationships that were not willing to be in mental lockstep with her.

This behavior was pre and post split.

Adam

Rand's motivation did not derive from power lust or the wish to control others. It derived from her mistaken view that she was absolutely right about everything, and that others were fools for not seeing the world the way she did.

Her genius had the effect of controlling others, but I don't think that was any part of her motivation.

[Dennis Hardin]

With apologies to Jefferson, eternal judgmental vigilance on everything which is presented to one's consciousness during the course of one 21st century day, is the price of insanity.

There are many routes to insanity. Spending too much time thinking is not likely to be one of them.

[caroljane]

But don't you see, Dennis? It's all about her, really. Not the ideas. Extricate Her from the ideas and you have a philosophy, on its own to grow or contract. Leave Her in and you must continually reinterpret her motivations for saying every single thing she said. The genius who attracted followers she did not want, also attracted followers she did want. The unowned, uneaten cake is getting stale, and the much-enjoyed pieces of it are running out.

[caroljane]

With apologies to Jefferson, eternal judgmental vigilance on everything which is presented to one's consciousness during the course of one 21st century day, is the price of insanity.

There are many routes to insanity. Spending too much time thinking is not likely to be one of them.

As a psychotherapist you cannot seriously believe this.

[Dennis Hardin]

With apologies to Jefferson, eternal judgmental vigilance on everything which is presented to one's consciousness during the course of one 21st century day, is the price of insanity.

There are many routes to insanity. Spending too much time thinking is not likely to be one of them.

As a psychotherapist you cannot seriously believe this.

As a psychotherapist who is utterly convinced of the superiority of cognitive-behavioral therapy to all other modalities--and the enormous challenge of the mental work it entails--I most definitely believe this.

[caroljane]

With apologies to Jefferson, eternal judgmental vigilance on everything which is presented to one's consciousness during the course of one 21st century day, is the price of insanity.

There are many routes to insanity. Spending too much time thinking is not likely to be one of them.

As a psychotherapist you cannot seriously believe this.

As a psychotherapist who is utterly convinced of the superiority of cognitive-behavioral therapy to all other modalities--and the enormous challenge of the mental work it entails--I most definitely believe this.

Dennis, my apologies. From the little I know of psychotherapy, I think I would concur with your convictions. Thinking of insanity I was thinking of psychiatry, and the obsessive round of "thinking" that the afflicted endure. Again, I apologize.

[Dennis Hardin]

Dennis, my apologies. From the little I know of psychotherapy, I think I would concur with your convictions. Thinking of insanity I was thinking of psychiatry, and the obsessive round of "thinking" that the afflicted endure. Again, I apologize.

No apology needed, Daunce. It occurred to me that you might be using the term "thinking" in a manner that calls for quotation marks.

I trust you will never doubt me again.

[9thdoctor]

http://www.philosophyinaction.com/archive/2012-02-26.html

Comrade Sonia's answer is up! I haven't listened to it yet, it's 42 minutes long. My evening's plans were just ruined by the discovery of a flat tire, so good chance I'll get to starting it tonight, but whether I'll ever finish it is yet to be seen. Her summary:

What constitutes consent in sex? Can a person give tacit consent by his or her actions? Is explicit consent required for some sex acts? Once consent has been given, when and how can a person withdraw that consent? Does the legal perspective on these questions differ from the moral perspective?

My Answer, In Brief: To consent to sex requires communicating a willingness engaging in the act, whether by word or deed. Consent can be withdrawn at any point, and for the other person to ignore that constitutes sexual assault.

[9thdoctor]

Alrightee, I finished it. There’s a serious case of elephant in the room going on here. She doesn’t mention Peikoff, Kobe Bryant, or anything from the podcast. And she constantly chuckles, even while talking about deadly serious issues. It was pretty nauseating, I can’t recommend putting in the time.

[caroljane]

Alrightee, I finished it. There’s a serious case of elephant in the room going on here. She doesn’t mention Peikoff, Kobe Bryant, or anything from the podcast. And she constantly chuckles, even while talking about deadly serious issues. It was pretty nauseating, I can’t recommend putting in the time.

I have not read or watched the comments, but I have been increasingly incredulous about a simple and probably offhand comment by an old man, in which he expressed the view that a man, at a certain point of arousal, is incapable of stopping himself from penetrating a female who resists him,and that females should realize and accept this.As a woman I know that men are capable of stopping when being told no,and so does Diana Hshieh, and so does every young Objectivist who is turning himself inside out on the issue.

[9thdoctor]

As a woman I know that men are capable of stopping when being told no,and so does Diana Hshieh, and so does every young Objectivist who is turning himself inside out on the issue.

But it's not just Peikoff! Look, here's another Canadian who wants to weigh in:

What's with you Canucks, anyway? Look at him dry humping that oversize guitar!

[Selene]

She did an adequate job.

I thought her "wiggle room" statement quite hilarious.

As a critic of public speaking, she really, really, really needs to stop saying really, really, really all the damn time...really.

I am sure her husband has been overpaying for his blow jobs because she did put out the ten dollar ($10.00) price and then wanted to quickly get off the topic with the "Let's move on now." Seemed a really, really, really, really uncomfortable moment for her.

All in all, it was an decent job of covering the topic.

Now the question for me is a hypothetical scenario as follows:

Pigero and Pope Leonard are in a San Francisco bar in the Mark Hopkins Hotel and they are drinking heavily in a really, really, really intense argument about induction.

It is getting late and the fiery conversation is getting them both excited. So Pigero hurls down the gauntlet and says, "Ok, you "closed system punk...let's continue this in my room, if you have the guts!"

Pope Leonard, swaying slightly, responds, shouting, "You think your man enough to take me! Let's go!"

Now, that "man enough to take me" statement swirls around in Pigero's alcohol saturated cerebrum and he decides to do just that on the elevator ride up.

Now the moral question is:

When Pigero jumps Pope Leonard from behind, can Pope Leonard, being drunk and having gone to his room withdraw his consent?

Guess not.

Well then a lot more than chickens will come home to roost.

[caroljane]

As a woman I know that men are capable of stopping when being told no,and so does Diana Hshieh, and so does every young Objectivist who is turning himself inside out on the issue.

But it's not just Peikoff! Look, here's another Canadian who wants to weigh in:

What's with you Canucks, anyway? Look at him dry humping that oversize guitar!

Hey, that's an American guitar. He told her she wasn't oversize at all !

[caroljane]

btw Ninth, i have not checked,On OO how many women have commented on the issue so far?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I once got so drunk (back in the day), I fell asleep on top of a woman. Penetrated and everything. True story.

I woke to this screeching and crying, "You're sleeping! Goddamit! You're sleeping!"

Man, that was embarrassing...

But was it rape in reverse?

Michael

[caroljane]

I once got so drunk (back in the day), I fell asleep on top of a woman. Penetrated and everything. True story.

I woke to this screeching and crying, "You're sleeping! Goddamit! You're sleeping!"

Man, that was embarrassing...

But was it rape in reverse?

Michael

Not if you were married to the woman in question at the time.

[9thdoctor]

btw Ninth, i have not checked,On OO how many women have commented on the issue so far?

Not everyone discloses their sex. Peikoff’s most stubborn supporter is named “Nicky”, is that short for Nicole or Nicholas? I haven’t tried to count.

I once got so drunk (back in the day), I fell asleep on top of a woman. Penetrated and everything. True story.

One of Comrade Sonia’s little asides in her discussion is that she approves of giving a man permission to have sex with a partner who’s asleep. She chuckles about liking to be woken up this way. She chuckles about everything.

The main takeaway I have at this point is that the Comrade has indeed been chastened by the Checking Premises people. There was no discussion of Peikoff's statement whatsoever. No indication of why/how this subject came up. But, maybe she's waiting for his expected revisit of the issue before going into attack mode. Otherwise, what cowardice!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Well at least my true luuuuv back then didn't have to worry about me being a typical Randian hero, rough sex and all.

I was a Randroid back then, but something tells me I didn't get it right.

Michael

[Peter]

Ninth Doctor wrote:

And she constantly chuckles, even while talking about deadly serious issues. It was pretty nauseating, I can’t recommend putting in the time.

end quote

“Putting in?” You are inviting Groucho Marx jokes here but I am not falling for it. A sexist corollary to this thread is, “Why do men joke sexually about women?” When I read Ninth’s phrase I immediately starting inventing sex jokes about Diana, who I do find attractive: “I bet I could get her to stop talking by . . .” Do women do this as routinely as men? They may just be more private with the sexual jokes.

Isn’t that Peikoff’s unspoken premise also? That men are machines manufactured with a mix of the volitional and the innate? Female faces, curves, boobs, butts, and body parts ring our bells and it is not our fault. I literally cannot stop looking if my bell is rung, until I get an elbow to the ribs by my better half.

Leonard can’t stop himself once he is, oh, ah, Je ne sais quoi, immersed in a subject. I am always like that even though I am a grandfather. Isn’t Doctor Peikoff modifying Objectivism to match the scientific reality?

The mind body dichotomy which is now called the Soul-Body Dichotomy in the Ayn Rand Lexicon, is what I am talking about, and it is worth looking at again, as printed below. You can be a human and an animal and be integrated. Or is Leonard not implying that?

Peter Taylor

From The Ayn Rand Lexicon, Soul-Body Dichotomy

Galt’s Speech,

For the New Intellectual, 138

They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations—he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

Galt’s Speech,

For the New Intellectual, 142

You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.

Galt’s Speech,

For the New Intellectual, 138

As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind.

“For the New Intellectual,”

For the New Intellectual, 51

The New Intellectual . . . will discard . . . the soul-body dichotomy. He will discard its irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action, reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. He will be an integrated man, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and that action divorced from ideas is suicidal. He will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology—the volitional level of reason and thought—is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue. He will know that men need philosophy for the purpose of living on earth.