Leonard Peikoff Edited The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics?

[ThatGuy]

38 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Brant,

That "prosecutor's brief" idea came from a guy over on SoloHQ who took a year off from everything to reread everything Rand wrote. I can't remember his name right now, but we were in contact backstage. I will post his name if I remember it.

This was a person who was not much of an active poster, or maybe he posted some, but was a low profile poster. So he was someone everyone knew, but few paid attention to as a shaker and maker.

In the very early days of the PARC wars, he wrote an article or maybe a post about PARC where he characterized it as a "prosecutor's brief" and suddenly everybody and their families started calling PARC  a "prosecutor's brief." Nobody ever thought to credit this guy, though. I wish I could remember his name, but, alas, I am not eternal enough to figure out how to search for it in the old SoloHQ archives (over at RoR, it is hard enough and over at Solo Passion, the SoloHQ stuff now links to the Wayback Machine).

And even in my own emails, without the guy's name, er... I just thought of something. I'm right now, this very minute, looking up "Hsieh" as a keyword in my emails.

Voilà! The name is William Perry. I don't recall the article or post where he reframed PARC as a prosecutor's brief, but if someone has the patience to look, they will definitively find it.

At least let it now be said--here, now and forever--that PARC as a prosecutor's brief was the idea of one William Perry.

  

He also told me that among the people around Diana Hsieh at the time, they were discussing rehabilitating the Brandens in some form, but only after both of them had died. This was supposed to be punishment for what they did to Ayn Rand.

All I could do was take that in without comment at the time and wonder, what's wrong with these people? Talk about an excess of control-freakness.

I made the mistake of telling Barbara this and she looked like I just drove a stake through her heart. She didn't speak--deadly silence--for about 5 minutes as she looked without blinking at a spot on the ground.

I never said this in public before because I didn't want to give the knuckleheads the satisfaction of knowing their malice had caused hurt to Barbara. They would interpret it as her feeling ashamed and that was not what she conveyed to me. Her hurt was more in the way of knowing that people in the movement she loved so dearly hated her for real, in reality, not in hyperbole. 

But I don't think any of this matters much anymore. Why? Because the influence of that whole PARC culture in spinning all Branden-related issues in a grossly distorted manner--and, and frankly, most of those people--don't matter anymore.

Like you said, PARC is unfixable. That includes what it stands for. So that's the important part: the result--not the mind-numbing hairsplitting over every word the Brandens ever uttered and every deed they ever did and every evil thought that could be imputed to them as their own thinking. That fringe will never go away, but at least it will remain fringe.

History as understood by the majority will not be rewritten by boneheads. Never fear, though. There will always be boneheads. They are like the poor, they will always be with us.

 

btw - I am at odds with Leonard Peikoff on many things, but I just don't see him participating in lying to the public until the Brandens died in order to punish them. I see his anti-Branden efforts in light of his beliefs about Rand, but not to the extent of becoming a dishonest historian in order to punish anyone.

In fact, not too long after I got that email, maybe it was a year or two, Hsieh was no longer in the good graces of Peikoff and his peeps.

Someone even made a website complaining about her and a small tribe of the pro-Peikovians signed on. The website was--and still is--called Checking Premises. They said it wasn't only about Hsieh, but she is practically all they wrote about with a couple of general CYA articles thrown in. I think all this started when she began discussing the morality of cannibalism through an Objectivist filter. Seriously.  

I had to do some real research to come up with some of this, especially names. They were nowhere to be found in my memory. Not readily.

Am I getting old or is this stuff just not important?

 

Ah... O-Land... Where would I be without ye?...

 

Michael

Is this the article you're looking for?

A Prosecutor's View of PARC
 

Submitted by William E. Perry on Fri, 2006-04-21 18:49

I’ve heard a funny criticism of James Valliant’s The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics. That is that he is arguing like a prosecutor. That is funny when it is addressed to me because I was a prosecutor for 21 years. It is also funny when addressed to Valliant because he IS a prosecutor.

That has made me think about the validity of the way prosecutors argue in general, and its application to PARC. This is not intended as a review, but merely as a comment about one aspect of the book.

Various critics have referred to PARC as an “indictment” or a “brief.” It is neither. An indictment is a formal charging document. A brief is an appellate argument. PARC is neither of these in either the literal, or the metaphorical sense. The book is a closing argument on behalf of Ayn Rand against the charges made against her by Barbara and Nathaniel Branden.

http://www.solopassion.com/node/871

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

TG,

That might be the one, but Perry is calling PARC a "closing argument" in that article.

I specifically remember him calling it a prosecutorial brief or something like that back then.

btw - I actually agree with his characterization in that article that it is a "closing argument," but only in the sense of boring the shit out of the jury and making them long for an easier death.

There are much better ways of telling a story for a closing argument than droning on and on and on and on and on with a long-ass mostly irrelevant bill of trivia--unfairly interpreted to the most cherry-picked standards of logic most of the time at that.

But who knows? Maybe my memory did play tricks on me. It wouldn't be the first time.

I am certain of the Barbara story, though, and I have my emails with Perry to consult on the rest.

Michael

[ThatGuy]

3 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

TG,

That might be the one, but Perry is calling PARC a "closing argument" in that article.

I specifically remember him calling it a prosecutorial brief or something like that back then.

btw - I actually agree with his characterization in that article that it is a "closing argument," but only in the sense of boring the shit out of the jury and making them long for an easier death.

There are much better ways of telling a story for a closing argument than droning on and on and on and on and on with a long-ass mostly irrelevant bill of trivia--unfairly interpreted to the most cherry-picked standards of logic most of the time at that.

But who knows? Maybe my memory did play tricks on me. It wouldn't be the first time.

I am certain of the Barbara story, though, and I have my emails with Perry to consult on the rest.

Michael

But he does mention the word "brief", if only to contradict it:

"Various critics have referred to PARC as an 'indictment' or a 'brief.' It is neither. "

[ThatGuy]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

TG,

That might be the one, but Perry is calling PARC a "closing argument" in that article.

I specifically remember him calling it a prosecutorial brief or something like that back then.

btw - I actually agree with his characterization in that article that it is a "closing argument," but only in the sense of boring the shit out of the jury and making them long for an easier death.

There are much better ways of telling a story for a closing argument than droning on and on and on and on and on with a long-ass mostly irrelevant bill of trivia--unfairly interpreted to the most cherry-picked standards of logic most of the time at that.

But who knows? Maybe my memory did play tricks on me. It wouldn't be the first time.

I am certain of the Barbara story, though, and I have me emails with Perry to consult on the rest.

Michael

Rereading...hmmm... You said it was from the  old solohq site, but the Perry piece I found was from the newer site.  I couldn't find anything from a William Perry, on the old site, regarding a prosecutor's brief quote. But... might it have been Wendy McElroy you're thinking of? This is what comes up on the  Rebirth of Reason site, when I searched for "brief" and "proscutor". From one of your posts:


"Here is a quote from the Wendy McElroy review, which is not completely favorable (albeit more pro than con):
'Valliant's book is not a scholarly work that aims to provide a balanced view; nor does it pretend to be. Valliant's book is not written in a 'popular' manner that seeks to entertain; nor does it pretend to be. The Passion is best viewed as a legal brief, with all the strengths and weaknesses inherent in that sort of document."

http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ArticleDiscussions/1208_7.shtml#154

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, ThatGuy said:

Rereading...hmmm... You said it was from the  old solohq site, but the Perry piece I found was from the newer site.

TG,

It was probably my memory.

No biggie.

This is what happens when one posts without checking. 

btw - Memory is a fascinating topic. Rand wrote very little about memory. I think the reality of it would have appalled her until she got used to it if she had learned the reality of it when she was alive.

The way most people think about memory, at least long term memory, is that mental events and abstractions reside in your brain somewhere and you simply retrieve them as you need them. However, the way memory really works is more like the cloud in computing. Bits of the memory of, say, an event reside all over the friggin' place in your brain and a lot of them are redundant. When you want to recall something, your brain literally reconstructs the mental event from the bits and pieces that are all over the place. More often than not, bits and pieces from other events, from movies, from stories, from childhood traumas, and on and on get in and become part of your certainty of that event. That is, until you check.

What's worse, that little sucker in your left brain Michael Gazzaniga calls "the interpreter" will simply make shit up if a bit or piece is missing from everywhere in your brain. That sucker exists to make sense of things even when they don't make sense. And since it has a lot to do, it will make up shit for the parts that don't fit at all so it can move on to other stuff.

If you don't have good self-esteem and understand this, it can wreak havoc on your soul when you are wildly off.

That doesn't give you an excuse to softly murmur the name of one lover in the ear of another while making love  , but this stuff exists in all of us. Your memory is mostly correct except when it isn't. The best way with memory is the Reagan adage, trust but verify.

 

I'll correct my other post so William Perry is no longer the source of the prosecutor's brief description of PARC. That was fun, but now that I know it's inaccurate, ah hell...  

I am sure he will understand, though. He himself is a prosecutor. Ask any prosecutor on earth about the reliability of eye-witness accounts of a crime...

 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

24 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I'll correct my other post so William Perry is no longer the source of the prosecutor's brief description of PARC.

It's fixed now.

For anyone interested, please go back and reread it.

Michael

[ThatGuy]

17 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

TG,

It was probably my memory.

No biggie.

This is what happens when one posts without checking. 

btw - Memory is a fascinating topic. Rand wrote very little about memory. I think the reality of it would have appalled her until she got used to it if she had learned the reality of it when she was alive.

The way most people think about memory, at least long term memory, is that mental events and abstractions reside in your brain somewhere and you simply retrieve them as you need them. However, the way memory really works is more like the cloud in computing. Bits of the memory of, say, an event reside all over the friggin' place in your brain and a lot of them are redundant. When you want to recall something, your brain literally reconstructs the mental event from the bits and pieces that are all over the place. More often than not, bits and pieces from other events, from movies, from stories, from childhood traumas, and on and on get in and become part of your certainty of that event. That is, until you check.

What's worse, that little sucker in your left brain Michael Gazzaniga calls "the interpreter" will simply make shit up if a bit or piece is missing from everywhere in your brain. That sucker exists to make sense of things even when they don't make sense. And since it has a lot to do, it will make up shit for the parts that don't fit at all so it can move on to other stuff.

If you don't have good self-esteem and understand this, it can wreak havoc on your soul when you are wildly off.

That doesn't give you an excuse to softly murmur the name of one lover in the ear of another while making love  , but this stuff exists in all of us. Your memory is mostly correct except when it isn't. The best way with memory is the Reagan adage, trust but verify.

 

I'll correct my other post so William Perry is no longer the source of the prosecutor's brief description of PARC. That was fun, but now that I know it's inaccurate, ah hell...  

I am sure he will understand, though. He himself is a prosecutor. Ask any prosecutor on earth about the reliability of eye-witness accounts of a crime...

 

Michael

Don't sweat it! Gawd know my memory ain't what it used to be...
None of this was meant to point out some kind of slip-up; I just like the "thrill of the hunt" of an informational scavenger-hunt and testing my google-fu, from time-to-time.