Kudos to Robert Campbell

[Victor Pross]

Rich,

I saw NB at one of those events you mention below. Where you there?

Some years ago he [NB] did a two day gig at the Learning Annex/Toronto- a lecture one night, a hands-on seminar the next. Fantastic international audience.

[Victor Pross]

Rich,

Exactly. "Bad faith" is a grab-bag formless, vague, bullshit word for a man who practically begged me to stay on, and he asked me to "work it out" with Jason with whom I was having war words with. The man can twist things to 'self-serve.' He's good at it, no doubt.

[Rich Engle]

Victor...

For the life of me I can't remember what year it was when I went to that. I'm thinkiing like maybe 6-7 years ago? Devers Branden was there too- she did some relaxation/warmups before the workshop part.

[Victor Pross]

Rich,

You say:

For the life of me I can't remember what year it was when I went to that. I'm thinkiing like maybe 6-7 years ago? Devers Branden was there too- she did some relaxation/warmups before the workshop part.

Well, 6-7 years ago sounds about right, it was in a modest size room with tables and chairs in Toronto's Annex area, as organized threw the Annex Learner. If so, we were in the same room. Now, how exciting is that?

Victor

[william.scherk]

WSS- You must be busy on other things; lately you just give us little tastes! More, please, if possible? You're a treat, man, a treat! More, more, more? Pretty please?

Jeepers, Rich -- that is flattering!

You are right. I am busy lately at my work and in some independent study -- too busy to give my best to OL (or RoR) . . . but I have been following several issues.

(Sometimes I find my posts to be too reactive and too hasty -- as with my snarky note to Victor. Sometimes I have the frame of my opinion ready set, and once I hit the keyboard the post writes itself. Other times I must labour at the piece, and those times lead to what I consider my better online work. The last couple months I have mostly spectated on the O-lists. Spectated because I am not quite sure what to conclude)

For example, the dissent at RoR issue. Once I had some of my practical questions answered -- it seemed clear to me that there are no clear criteria for this banning but that which annoys Joe Rowlands. But I am not quite sure about this.

We can give thanks to Ethan for attempting (with marginal success so far) to clear up the criteria -- but objectively, we can know nothing but what has come from Rowlands' pen:

-- People who are here to argue against Objectivism will

be marked in that category and that will leave them only

able to post in the Dissent Forum.

-- I will be making the final decision on who gets to join

that select group.

-- the marked person finds out when they try to post on

another forum, and it doesn't work. They get a message

telling them that this site is for Objectivists, but

they're free to use the dissent board.

-- Non-marked members find out who's marked because they

always post somewhere at what a horrible atrocity this all

is comparing my acts to Hitler.

-- As for who's been promoted, I don't really feel like

dwelling on it. Making that kind of announcement is like

asking for feedback, and it's not up for discussion or

debate.

-- They just have to restrict their comments to a well-

defined area instead of polluting the site.

The most revealing part of Rowlands' remarks is also the explanation of why Ethan Dawe is here for the moment: "it's not up for discussion or debate" at Rebirth of Reason.

Regarding your notes about 'good faith' in relation to La Perigo -- it is in the eye of the beholder. Easily as subjective and arbitrary a criteria as Rowlands'. I had thought that the best part of SOLO was the relatively 'light touch' (noted in my April 26 post "Sunny Days ahead for SOLO." My opinions were, of course, ill-considered -- the 'red button' criteria at SOLO is not much different than the two types of banning at RoR: when you piss off the owner).

Here's where I first pissed off La Perigo, by posting the cartoon 'Mrs Parson's Finishing School for Squirrels' in the this thread.

Rich, until I get a bit more free time, you perhaps will settle for a couple of other 'piss off the owner' posts?

'What if Ayn Rand had been a Man?'

'By the better angels of our nature'

William Scott Scherk

++++++++++++++++++++

For bonus points, my inestimable esteem to the first person here who can not only identify the author of the passage below, but also speculate to good effect on why the passage made La Perigo flip out . . .

"Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not

remove our respective sections from each other nor build

an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may

be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the

reach of each other, but the different parts of our

country can not do this. They can not but remain face to

face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must

continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make

that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory

after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties

easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more

faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among

friends? Suppose you go to war, you can not fight

always; and when, after much loss on both sides and no

gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old

questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon

you."

. . .

"I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends.

We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained

it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic

chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and

patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all

over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the

Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by

the better angels of our nature."

[Michael Russell]

WSS: "For bonus points, my inestimable esteem to the first person here who can not only identify the author of the passage below, but also speculate to good effect on why the passage made La Perigo flip out . . ."

Ah, Lincoln's first Inaugural Address, what a beautiful speech. As for what made "La Perigo flip out", I don't know. What I do know, is that it's hard to beat the discourse I found as a lurker on SOLOHQ.

[Rich Engle]

Rich,

You say:

For the life of me I can't remember what year it was when I went to that. I'm thinkiing like maybe 6-7 years ago? Devers Branden was there too- she did some relaxation/warmups before the workshop part.

Well, 6-7 years ago sounds about right, it was in a modest size room with tables and chairs in Toronto's Annex area, as organized threw the Annex Learner. If so, we were in the same room. Now, how exciting is that?

Victor

That was the place, Victor. We might have even been in sentence completion groups together, the way he kept shifting people around... Heavens!

[Philip Coates]

> In the last decade, academic research on self-esteem has taken some strides ahead. There are other treatises or theory books now with messages pretty similar to Dr. Branden's--books by Bednar and Peterson, or by Mruk, come to mind, along with articles by authors like Kernis, or Morf and Rhodewalt.

Hi Robert,

To the extent they are making points that were not in the literature prior to him, I wonder if they have read him and are plagiarizing him or if his views are "in the air" and spread to third parties who don't realize they have been influenced by him.

I also have similar questions in the field of academic philosophy re the revival of realism and pro-reason and Aristotelianism in the decades since Rand first started writing. Whether she had an influence and people are citing views very like hers but are not plagiarizing because they are unaware.

Any thoughts?

Phil

[Reidy]

Tibor Machan has accused Phillippa Foot, one of the most eminent modern ethical philosophers, not of plagiarism (she beat Rand to it by a few years) but of snobbishness in refusing to acknowledge that an academic outsider has had something important to say on the subject. In any case I recommend her Natural Goodness.

I'm not up on the field, but my impression is that non-Objectivist philosophers came to any Rand-like positions they may have independently of her, often before she took these positions herself and in any case before she started getting academic respect.

Peter

[Robert Campbell]

Phil,

The picture is complex.

Some of today's psychologists do cite Nathaniel Branden. Christopher Mruk is quite explicit about what he got from NB. Michael Kernis invited NB to contribute to an anthology (which should be published soon). Others would prefer not to acknowledge a debt to a non-academic (some of NB's adversaries openly sneer at him as a "pop psychologist" [Roy Baumeister] or a "clinical psychologist" [susan Blackmore]). Still others aren't aware that some of the people they cite were, in their turn, influenced by him.

If you followed the entire latest round of pig-rasslin' over at SOLOP, you may have noted my comments about Tara Smith's non-citation of Nathaniel Branden in the passages of her new book that deal with self-esteem. I focused on the cases where pre-1968 articles by NB that Dr. Smith damn well knows about were passed over. But there's more. She cites non-Objectivist philosophers during the past 25 years on self-esteem (e.g., Stephen Darwall), but of course she doesn't say where they got their ideas about self-esteem. Dollars to doughnuts, these philosophers got them from psychologists... and at least indirect influence from NB is worth checking for in these cases as well.

Robert

PS. In a 1954 book, where he put forward a precursor to today's notion of self-esteem, Abraham Maslow cited The Fountainhead. In Ayn Rand Answers, you can see how Ayn Rand repaid him. Blecch!

[Robert Campbell]

Phil,

On the general realist/Aristotelian issues, the picture is also complex.

Rand did influence some philosophers who would rather not cite her because she is still a hot potato in academic philosophy.

And there is snobbery, of the sort that Tibor complained of. Marjorie Grene, a famous philosopher of biology, is said to have quit reading The Evidence of the Senses shortly after encountering the first citation of Rand, which she deemed "unprofessional."

On the other hand, Randians have lifted from 20th century Aristotelians without crediting them. On another thread here, Roger Bissell indicated that Harry Binswanger had done this with regard to the Liar Paradox. Doug Rasmussen pointed out to me years ago that Peikoff got his car crash example (which he used to use in lectures on perception) from John Cook Wilson, an Oxford Aristotelian who died in the 1920s. Roger and Doug R know all of this stuff much better than I do--I suspect they could point us to further examples.

The less of this crap that goes on, the better. Neither Randians nor non-Randians hold a monopoly on it; all of them need to knock it off.

Robert Campbell

[Robert Campbell]

Peter,

Some non-Randians clearly did develop their ideas without knowing about Rand at all.

No one's ever suggested that Hilary Putnam, during his high-realist period (the mid-1970s), got his ideas about definitions being contextual and subject to change over time, etc., from Rand. Given his politics at the time (Communist), he'd have freaked if anyone in his vicinity had pointed out the convergences between "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" and ITOE. And his style of argument, replete with science-fiction examples, was rather obviously non-Randian.

Robert

[Rich Engle]

I'm getting the impression that there are some who can't accept the concept of parallel development.

[Robert Campbell]

Rich,

If you mean the SOLOPpers, they'll accept parallel development if it means that Rand didn't borrow from someone else.

If it means that someone else didn't borrow from Rand, that's a whole 'nother matter.

Did you notice that Fred Weiss was eager to assert (with no real evidence) that David Kelley borrowed without attribution from Harry Binswanger? But when confronted with Binswanger's recent talk and its obvious debt to a certain book by Kelley that Binswanger is known to have read, he was all for parallel development.

Robert Campbell

[Rich Engle]

Rich,

If you mean the SOLOPpers, they'll accept parallel development if it means that Rand didn't borrow from someone else.

If it means that someone else didn't borrow from Rand, that's a whole 'nother matter.

Did you notice that Fred Weiss was eager to assert (with no real evidence) that David Kelley borrowed without attribution from Harry Binswanger? But when confronted with Binswanger's recent talk and its obvious debt to a certain book by Kelley that Binswanger is known to have read, he was all for parallel development.

Robert Campbell

Well, yeah, of course he was! Like I said earlier, I think he's got terminal flatulence. Martin Luther had it, look what it did to him... a man just can't think straight when his bowels aren't right. B)