The new guy

[warelock]

Hi there,

I am a new Objectivist and am glad to have found this forum. Objectivism is the philosophy I've been living all my life, but only in fractured pieces. Reading Atlas Shrugged pulled it all together for me. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I'm in favor of "closed" rather than "open" Objectivism. I think it's extremely important to stay strong and not sanction or tolerate the irrational wherever it may arise. The future of the human race depends on it.

I'm also an atheist (implied by my being an Objectivist) and an INTJ (by the Myers-Briggs personality typing scale). I'm very interested in the economic gold standard and how technology can be used as a means to make it a reality in this Internet age. If there were a "Galt's Gulch" I'd move to go live there right now.

I used to be a libertarian (small "L") so some of those ideas will leak through from time to time. However, I do realize that liberty isn't everything and to declare it good without knowing why it is good is not a wise path to follow. The libertarian movement is too tolerant of irrationality and provides an "umbrella" that seeks to shelter religious freedom as we have known it (just one example). I believe in the rule of law and limited government. That is, at least until the populace at large becomes enlightened.

I'm a work in progress so by all means *constructively* challenge my thinking, but please be gentle. :-)

Cheers!

[Selene]

Welcome Warelock.

It looks like you are out west, east coast NJ/NYC here. Really excellent place for you. Just do not count on gentle lol.

What do you do for a living/student?

You will find this a fine place. I have been here a little over a year and truly enjoy this forum. It is the only forum I participate in.

Enjoy.

Adam

[Alfonso Jones]

Hi there,

I am a new Objectivist and am glad to have found this forum. Objectivism is the philosophy I've been living all my life, but only in fractured pieces. Reading Atlas Shrugged pulled it all together for me. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I'm in favor of "closed" rather than "open" Objectivism. I think it's extremely important to stay strong and not sanction or tolerate the irrational wherever it may arise. The future of the human race depends on it.

I'm also an atheist (implied by my being an Objectivist) and an INTJ (by the Myers-Briggs personality typing scale). I'm very interested in the economic gold standard and how technology can be used as a means to make it a reality in this Internet age. If there were a "Galt's Gulch" I'd move to go live there right now.

I used to be a libertarian (small "L") so some of those ideas will leak through from time to time. However, I do realize that liberty isn't everything and to declare it good without knowing why it is good is not a wise path to follow. The libertarian movement is too tolerant of irrationality and provides an "umbrella" that seeks to shelter religious freedom as we have known it (just one example). I believe in the rule of law and limited government. That is, at least until the populace at large becomes enlightened.

I'm a work in progress so by all means *constructively* challenge my thinking, but please be gentle. :-)

Cheers!

Warelock -

Welcome to OL. Make yourself at home. Browse around and read. There's a lot of good material here.

Bill P

[Brant Gaede]

Hi. I hope you put up more personal info so we get a better idea of who you are. In any case, hi!

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

In the meantime, I think your name is Victor Pross.

--Brant

[Selene]

Brant:

So I guess you never had to make out that check!

Adam

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

In the meantime, I think your name is Victor Pross

Brant,

His email name is "dvl6r8j02" and he uses an email service commonly used by people seeking anonymity.

People can make of this what they wish.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Brant:

So I guess you never had to make out that check!

Adam

No. I've got a feel for these things. Victor should stick to drawing. That's his thing. I may be wrong. If I am, "warelock" might get a big hunk of money or at least an apology. So, "warelock," don't run away. Be brave. Jump into the interesting, for if you ain't the other guy, you're about to get an interesting education. This can be a weird place, but who cares about you if you don't care about "interesting"?

--Brant

Edited January 18, 2009 by Brant Gaede

[Chris Grieb]

Guys; Haven't any of you heard of the presumption of innocence?

I guess this is the OL equivalent of seeing a Victor Pross under every bed.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Chris,

Too many cases of elaborate anonymity measures and backstage stealth tactics added to online shaggy dog stories have made me a bit gun-shy about "innocence" and good will.

I don't have any problem with people who let you know who they are. As for shaggy dogs, they certainly know who we are, yet they want us to take them on faith.

The reality principle of public anonymity goes like this: if somebody goes to great lengths to hide his identity, yet wishes a public platform, this is because he has something compromising to hide and, with ultra-rare exceptions, does not come in good faith.

I have no feelings one way or another about offending someone like that.

But there are even worse cases. You should see when a person invents an alias, picture, bio and all, or tries to steal someone else's identity. People of bad faith do these things so they can talk about virtue and integrity with people like us.

Michael

[tjohnson]

Guys; Haven't any of you heard of the presumption of innocence?

I guess this is the OL equivalent of seeing a Victor Pross under every bed.

Assume the best but be prepared for the worst.

[DavidMcK]

I realize from reading this that I've never really said much about my own circumstances. I've been on here for quite a while mostly reading. I've been recalled to NY about 16 months; I work at JFK with AMR (formerly at LGA); I was laid off for about 2 1/2 years. It is nice to be back in NY. I'm a mechanic for AA now in avionics. hmm what else? I love to read and listen to classical music. I'm interested in investing; trying to get richer so that I can have a piano and my own place to practice the piano in without bothering anyone. I live in Elmhurst. My favorite books are of course AR but I've gotten a great deal out of Nathaniel Branden's books and could still get more out of them. My favorite Objectivist book is Chris Sciabarra's AR The Russian Radical. I'm 54 unmarried. I could go on I suppose but this seems like enough.

[Brant Gaede]

Guys; Haven't any of you heard of the presumption of innocence?

I guess this is the OL equivalent of seeing a Victor Pross under every bed.

Chris, he's writing in the same style as VP did last time VP tried to come on board--here and at SOLOP. This time he's omitted his name and location apparently so he can't be pinned down. There is zip in the profile. There is also that I'm naive about Objectivism so don't beat me up quality of presenting himself. No sense of a real person at all.

--Brant

edit: I went over to SOLOP to see if someone was trying to get on board and yesterday appeared a "Shawn Odegard" who is somewhat suspicious. Not quite VP's writing style and you can Google someone with that name. If he is VP he'll soon enough give himself away.

Edited January 18, 2009 by Brant Gaede

[kiaer.ts]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlock

[Dragonfly]

Chris, he's writing in the same style as VP did last time VP tried to come on board--here and at SOLOP.

Yup. I also found the style suspiciously similar. It isn't so easy to disguise your personality if you don't copy the texts of others.

[Brant Gaede]

Chris, he's writing in the same style as VP did last time VP tried to come on board--here and at SOLOP.

Yup. I also found the style suspiciously similar. It isn't so easy to disguise your personality if you don't copy the texts of others.

I just went to SOLOP again. "Shawn" just made his second posting, I'm pretty sure it's VP now. They're welcome to him. Unfortunately, I think they're getting on to him too.

--Brant

[Selene]

Folks:

As a virgin to this forum and as someone who thankfully missed all the internal Objectivist drama, could someone give me a thumbnail on this Victor Pross individual.

I am assuming that he is the caricaturist.

Adam

[Brant Gaede]

Over 2200 posts, most of the material simply plagiarized. I didn't read most of it. Later, it was fairly obvious what was his own material because it was so poorly done. There wasn't very much comparatively. If you want an example of that material go to Solo Passion and read the threat he started on "Reading Atlas Shrugged Again" under the pseudo-name of Shawn Odegard. It's the typical, lying crap he is so good at. I know it's Victor because only he can be so bad writing about anything except, maybe, his actual work.

--Brant

Edited January 19, 2009 by Brant Gaede

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Adam,

The sequence of events went like this:

Pross showed up out of the blue one day on Solo Passion. He started commenting on the things the people over there hate, especially the Brandens, and tried to out-bash the bashers in post after post. At first they loved him, but after a while they started calling him on plagiarism issues. At first he first vehemently denied it, then capitulated and admitted it.

As that peaked, a huge lynch mob mentality against him surged. Then one day he simply signed up to OL as a member. After all the bashing, I couldn't believe someone would be that dense. So I got in touch with him offline and asked what he wanted. He was smarting greatly from the lynch mob stuff. I saw this cut deep, so I thought this might be an opportunity to see if morality could be taught and, fully believing that the people on Solo Passion had overreacted and further seeing a good opportunity to rub their noses in their malice (after all the bashing of Brandens, OL, etc., they had been doing—and this was shortly after Hsieh's shameful Sciabarra mess), I judged Pross to have a typical artist's vanity. I thought that was the root of his problem and gave him the benefit of the doubt on plagiary. As I had produced many pop artists, I thought I could "find his language" so to speak and present him with enough facts, using his language, that he would eschew the irrational bombast in bashing folks, and especially get away from the ARI line of bashing and schisms. I also imagined that learning how to source quotes was not rocket science and that, for some odd reason, he had not learned why this should be done, so this would be easy to correct.

The thing inevitably turned into an "us against them affair" instead of a "thinking for oneself affair" and I supported Pross to give him time for things to sink in at the premise level. I later discovered he had no intention of letting anything sink in. After a while, people on OL started seeing through him (some had always seen through him), but I was committed to my little project. Pross started thinking he was being manipulated by me and the people on OL thought I was nuts. Tempers flared a lot back then.

I tried to handle this as best I could by email. In order to get revenge against me (so Pross says), he started plagiarizing all over the place on OL in attempts to win arguments. I think revenge might have been part of it, but I now fully believe that emotional imbalance and just plain immorality accounts for the bulk.

He ended up being busted for plagiarizing Diana Hsieh and Nicholas Dykes. He made his mea culpas and promises never to do it again after he was caught. I even helped him write the texts to see if I could get the point across to him and stave off the public bashing long enough for him to reflect and do his own thinking. But I started getting more and more irritated.

Finally a young student at ARI, Dan Edge, showed up on OL and listed a whole bunch of Pross's plagiarisms, citing quotes from post after post and giving links to the originals.

I had egg all over my face. Simply stated, I had fucked up.

So I apologized to OL members, banned Pross, started my own search to discover more plagiarisms (which is still not finished), wrote to the people he plagiarized with due apology and links, and tried to clean up the mess as best I could. The amount of plagiarisms was unbelievable. I didn't know where to put all that, so I opened a section on OL called "The Garbage Pile." You can see a lot of Pross's plagiarisms in the following thread (and others in that section): List of plagiarisms by Victor Pross.

There now exist better tools for checking plagiarism than at that time, so I will most likely bite the bullet one day and finish the job. Back then I did it the hard way by typing in phrases and sentences on Google, or looking at printed books I suspected he plagiarized.

While Pross was on Solo Passion, he had several accounts and tried unsuccessfully to post under aliases after he had been busted for plagiarism. Posting under aliases is a habit with him and I have seen it in all his online activity. He also plagiarized a lot of stuff on Solo Passion (even plagiarizing Perigo once without being detected at the time), which detracts from his argument that he did it on OL to get back at me.

While he was on OL, a young woman got smitten by him and the two started a public online romance. They lived far apart, but managed to meet once. After the plagiarsim thing erupted, she cut off the relationship and Pross, who took the rejection badly, has since stalked her using one alias after another and has posted awful things about her under his own name on places like Ayn Rand Meetup when he would get frustrated.

Nowadays, he tries to get back on OL and on Solo Passion through aliases and shaggy dog stories. Whenever something like the present thread happens and people speculate that it might be him, he immediately sends me emails taunting me and claiming he is not the new member. (I don't respond.) So I will probably expect to receive a bunch of them after this post. I mostly don't read them and simply put them in a file.

There's a lot more that went on, but that is the gist of it. One thing is for sure, I learned what I had to learn about teaching morality. If a person does not want to adopt ethical behavior through his own volition, nobody can teach it to him.

I still believe morality can be taught, but nowadays I am very attentive to whether the person lives by doing what he thinks is right, or whether he has other priorities. He must want to have good character irrespective of the philosophy or religion he grew up in or adopted. Then morality can be taught. My mistake with Pross was imagining he wanted to be good, but just could not see certain things. I now believe he sees them and has always seen them.

I have hopes that one day Pross will make different choices, but I do not have much expectation of it. Meanwhile, we keep getting anonymous new members without web history who use proxy connections and tell shaggy dog stories.

Apropos, there might be other people doing this stuff in addition to Pross. When I was on SoloHQ and first started becoming popular, some nasty folks used this procedure to try to disrupt matters. Lot's of shaggy dog stories with them, too. I even know who they are, since I was told backstage. For as much as I don't like Hsieh, I see people do this to her all the time and I do not approve of it.

Aliases can be useful for commercial or political reasons like Rand did. But what these folks do is petty cowardice because they are unable to get an audience otherwise. If the public knows who they are, folks stop paying attention to them. Their moral compass is public attention instead of integrity.

There are some real pieces of work in our subculture.

Michael

[warelock]

Wow... It seems like you guys have had a rough time of it with some of your members.

As to my anonymity, I apologize if that stirs some pot that I had no intention of stirring. All I can do is give you my assurance that this is the first time I've been to this forum. I am a private person and take steps to keep my free expression separate from other entangling bits in my personal life. It's a habit that I'm not likely to break soon.

I hope you can accept me on the face of what I say, rather than who you think I am (with no direct evidence indicating otherwise). I am genuinely interested in Objectivism and have no intention of disrupting the peace here.

[Selene]

Thank you Michael and Brant.

That is thumbnail enough.

Adam

[Brant Gaede]

That means, warelock, you have no ID--here.

--Brant

Edited January 19, 2009 by Brant Gaede

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

All I can do is give you my assurance that this is the first time I've been to this forum.

warelock,

You ask for something you do not give. Your assurance means very little.

I hope you can accept me on the face of what I say, rather than who you think I am (with no direct evidence indicating otherwise).

Only a fool would do that.

If you find value here and are a different person, this will become clear over time. If you are not, that will become clear, too. It the meantime, you are not entitled to what you have not earned or traded. Others may be more generous, but I have a forum to run. Don't expect it from me.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

It's not hard to maintain your privacy and come across as a real and sincere person, but you have to cough up some information. Nothing. That's why I still think it's VP. Now I'm beginning to pity the guy.

--Brant

Edited January 19, 2009 by Brant Gaede

[warelock]

All I can do is give you my assurance that this is the first time I've been to this forum.

warelock,

You ask for something you do not give. Your assurance means very little.

I hope you can accept me on the face of what I say, rather than who you think I am (with no direct evidence indicating otherwise).

Only a fool would do that.

If you find value here and are a different person, this will become clear over time. If you are not, that will become clear, too. It the meantime, you are not entitled to what you have not earned or traded. Others may be more generous, but I have a forum to run. Don't expect it from me.

Michael

Fair enough...