FOLLOW THE LEADER!


Victor Pross

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Jonathan: "Hilarious, Victor. I love the diaper. But where is his trusty evil-fighting weapon, his golden, super-pomposity-powered air conducting baton?"

Damn, Jonathan! What a great idea! Shit, now I'll have to do a new one! You clearly have a whacko imagination...like me. I like that. Very good.

Victor

PS.

Thanks Michael and Michael [is there an echo in here?]

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Now you've gone and done it, Victor...

And here I've been trying to back off the curmudgeon jokes.

But, this air conducting thing... tuxedo, maybe in front of a boom box...

Fouled, half-inflated Mario Lanza love doll crumpled in the corner...

No. Forget I said all that.

rde

I gotta get back to church.

Edited by Rich Engle
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Guest Damage Inc.
linz_by_victor-1.jpg

I'm so going to hell for this.

Why not do an insulting caricature of Michael Stuart Kelly? See if he laughs it off, or gets enraged? Just a thought.

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Damage,

Your Question: "Why not do an insulting caricature of Michael Stuart Kelly? See if he laughs it off, or gets enraged? Just a thought."

My Answer: "Because I have more respect for him than I do Perigo, and I'm in MSK's home."

What's more: I have offered to do a caricature of MSK, only it wouldn't be insulting.

Victor

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General statement:

If only someone would have the balls to post this caricature on SLOP. I know I can't. They have a "troll patrol" after all. The prison wall you see in the rendering is not to keep people in--but to keep people out. Both shit-heads AND those who would challenge Super Linz's bogus authority--this bogus wannabe "Objectivist" leader. [Objectivist leader...now there's a contradiction in terms]. Perigo is to Objectivism what Michael Moore is to soft-headed, simpleton pissy lefty-types.

I hope this wasn’t too Pollyannaish.

Victor

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Victor, we so think alike it seems !!! I was just going to point that out as well. The Objectivist "Leader." Wow, there's a contradiction for you. I'm sure he truly believes he is a "Leader." If there is a "Leader," then you must have followers (collectivism.) In a rational philosophy, there are no "Leaders." Only Individual Rational Men and Women.

Edited by CNA
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oops, forgot to mention this in my last post that I thought your caricature was hilarious. I liked the diaper and the cape...wooohoooo....super shit boy !!! I just so had to say it.

What's up with the bottle of booze off to the side?

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"What's up with the bottle of booze off to the side?"

Ah, I just "felt" like drawing it for no reason other than the whim to do so...kidding.

A few years back, an article came out called "The Drooling Beast" reporting Linz as an alcoholic. It wasn’t contested on his part, as far as I know, and so that’s the simple reason for the inclusion of a booze bottle. Mind you, I wish I would have put paint brushes in it. Hee-hee.

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I thought the Follow the Leader was very funny. I also recall a post from Bill Perry saying that he did not believe that Lindsay was a drunk. I must say that they only time I met the man he (Lindsay) he was drinking.

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Angie,

If you are interested in the article, here it is: Drooling Beast by James Kilbourne, published July 31, 2005 (just last year, although it does seem longer).

How this came about was that on the old SoloHQ site, Perigo had a nasty habit of posting very stupid and rude messages - usually full of foul language - to people who did not deserve his verbal abuse. The next day he would apologize, saying he had partaken of one too many the night before and was not himself. This happened a lot. He also constantly sang the glories of booze and getting drunk in his banter. Some people in NZ who fell out with him reported many stories of excessive drinking. His written biography has several accounts of drunken antics and people complaining about them. Let's say there were lots of signs of heavy drinking and cutting up.

James Kilbourne is a close friend of Barbara. I just met him this past July and he is a marvelously sensitive and passionate person. I think he loves music more than I do, and that is saying a lot. He is gay and in love with a guy named Sergio, who had been in the early stages of hard drug addiction recovery at that time. James wrote a few very moving articles back then on Sergio's struggles and beating his addiction. These times are highly emotional. The whole atmosphere is charged with insecurity and joy and heartache and violent emotional contrasts. An almost superhuman self-honesty is practically the only thing that will pull you through them. James was no exception, especially as his love of Sergio runs as deep as any love I have ever witnessed.

He looked at Perigo, saw a bunch of high profile members leaving SoloHQ one after the other over the excessive and constant verbal abuse, saw all the signs of heavy drinking, and simply took matters into his own hands. He wrote "Drooling Beast," calling Perigo an alcoholic, and sent it in. Perigo allowed the article to run because there was a lot of talk throughout the Objectivist and libertarian community back then about his drunken antics and he thought this would be one more item - but quite serious. To try to stop the spread of his image as someone with a drinking problem, he decided to bring it out into the open and "trounce" it. Barbara misunderstood his reason for letting the article run, thinking that he was publicly admitting a drinking problem and would seek help, so she congratulated him on his courage in a post.

He took a couple of weeks off to reflect. Actually, this was time he used to put all his rationalizations in place. If he had said, "Yes, I have been going overboard, folks, as is on public record. I'll tone it down some, but I ain't no alcoholic. Sorry." That would have been the end of it. But some other things were cooking.

The first is that Barbara was in the initial stages of getting some very important people involved in the SoloHQ project and she cringed at the thought of him going off on them (foundation presidents, donors of serious money, people of that nature), calling them (let's use a name from his recent repertoire) something like "Saddam's cocksucker" in a drunken rage. So she extracted a promise from him to hold onto his temper in public. He interpreted this as meddling and an attempt by her to perform a "Perigo makeover." He took her interest more personally than the situation warranted. The fact is he was never really a close friend of hers. (They did have a cordial relationship, though.)

The second thing is that Perigo dreams of being an Objectivist leader. He tastes it. (Just like he dreamed of being a communist leader before he converted to Rand.) He has stated in several places that the charge of alcoholism is highly damaging to his status as an Objectivist leader. (I would have to search to find the quotes, but there are several out there.)

After the article went up, all his drinking buddies popped up to defend him. Joining in were others who praised drinking and "nobody telling them what to do, by God." James left and never looked back. Barbara hung on for awhile, but Perigo tried to strong-arm her into hating a person he hated (Jim Peron - a long story), using the drinking thing as a bludgeon. She refused to back down, announced her intention to leave and then Perigo and Rowlands (his partner at the time) banned her from the site. I tried to mediate a truce backstage but failed miserably. Shortly thereafter, Perigo embraced Valliant's book (PARC) that was highly critical of Barbara (and Nathaniel) and he started a campaign against her that persists to the present.

His anti-Barbara campaign has resulted in some really silly things, like a trip halfway around the world to give a speech against her near where the TAS Summer Seminar was being held. This was at a book-signing for PARC and approximately 10-12 people showed up (free admission). He has turned himself into the laughing stock of the Objectivist and libertarian community, except for ARI sympathizers and his own followers. (He has followers of course because, after all, he is an Objectivist leader.) I suspect that the ARI people think of him more as a useful idiot (in the Lenin sense) than anything else because he constantly writes things against the Brandens, TAS, Sciabarra and other independents and encourages others to do so.

The remark Victor said about paint brushes is that Barbara, in her biography of Rand (PAR), stated that the maid found lots of empty booze bottles in Frank O'Connor's painting studio after he died. (He was Rand's husband, but they apparently lived lives that were distant from each other during the day.) Peikoff suggested that Frank collected these empty booze bottles because he used them to mix his paints with. Valliant defended this possibility tooth and nail in order to discredit Barbara. It was quite a hoot, to tell you the truth.

That's about it. With Victor, Perigo & Co. have accused him, in their typical ham-handed boneheaded manner, of plagiary and trying to weasel his way back onto their site through accounts using pseudonyms. We better be careful, though. Victor, who likes to outdo people, might start mixing his own paints in crack or meth vials and never produce anything anymore... :)

Michael

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Michael; Thank very much for the explanation. I will read the article. Where you at the appearance at the bookstore? I might have gone if I had known people were going to it. Thanks again.

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Chris,

I wasn't at the bookstore book signing by Valliant. If I had been, the sparks probably would have flown.

Perigo's speech there is available in audio and print form at his website. You should see the modest list of posts like "Wonderful speech," "KASS!" and so forth by his followers. (He does have followers, you know, because he is an Objectivist leader.) One guy even stated that it was the best speech ever made by a human being. Seriously. (Outside the comical exaggeration, I wonder what other type of creatures make speeches if not human beings. :) )

The Q&A is also available in audio. Valliant's speech was posted for a time, but I think they took it down.

Michael

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MSK,

That is, on the whole, a very accurate account of what happened. It was fairly transparent right off the rip. It's good you marked all the timelines and such. When it went down, it was pretty easy to pick apart. I've never heard a story with any weight to it that flew well in the face of the facts.

Additionally, I'd say that Perigo got pretty sensitive about his consumption. I say this because, if one were to drag the swamp a bit, what you will find is a number of posts about other things where he introduces retorts about drinking into a conversation that clearly had nothing to do with that, or at the best a marginal one. It was like he was playing "The 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon" (if you don't know that game here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon ) only with wine. I was quite suprised that he did this, I thought he was a little more of a player than that; he doesn't really do that well under direct fire, particularly when this came to him. It hit a button, for sure.

Now, I don't give a rat's buttockios if Linz swills, or how much. I hope he enjoys it to whatever degree he does. I'm reasonably sure the drunken stories have some back to them, they always do (I have a few of my own). None of that matters to me. If anything, the person it seemed to matter the most to was him, because he went on and on about it in the oddest places. Maybe a few too many glasses of grape lets the dragon out quicker, but that's not the core, just a vehicle. He doesn't fly all that evenly in general, and a lot of kind of off-target curses roll off him. Linzisms, indeed- I would hate to say my artistic peak as a writer included being known for originating "kass," "pussball,", "pomowanker," and other treats.

But hey, that's his deal. His online personnae speaks for itself, I hope he's happy with it. I could ignore him, often I ignore him, I try to ignore him more daily, but it's hard to resist, given what he throws out there.

A leader? He could, but not the way he's currently morphed himself.

Now see, Michael? We're giving him more blessed attention. You started hoe-ing the row (well, actually Victor did).

rde

Definitely needs to attend UU church next week.

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