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MisterSwig

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Everything posted by MisterSwig

  1. I never met him, and I don't have much of an opinion on whether he was an evil person. From what I've read and heard, I think he mistreated Rand for years. I'm saying he was dishonest in this particular situation, and I don't see a reasonable excuse for his dishonesty.
  2. What do you make of his use of the adjective "insuperable"? Doesn't that suggest he never had a romantic relationship with her, because of the age difference? In Judgment Day he puts it a little differently, writing: When the relevant context is presented, he has to say that her age became a problem, when clearly it wasn't when they started. By omitting the relevant context in his 1968 letter, he can pretend like it was always an "insuperable barrier." Of course he also failed to mention that he had fallen in love with someone else, and that was a factor. So I frankly don't believe it had much to do with the age difference. That was a convenient excuse for his romantic confusion and dishonesty.
  3. Our new episode is about autism. We explore various aspects of this developmental disorder, including its history, causes, and real life examples and fictional depictions in movies and TV. Check it out!
  4. Tell him that your gender is "Ayn Rand," and your pronouns are "Ayn Rand is the best" and "Ayn Rand is the greatest." Seriously, though, have you tried asking him why he added his pronouns?
  5. I looked into this after our interview with James Valliant. The letters are titled "In Answer to Ayn Rand" and they still appear on Barbara Branden's website. From Part 1: I believe the above is a lie by omission. It leaves the implication that he did not have an affair with Rand, despite her wanting one.
  6. Thanks for listening. I do hope to have a second interview with him and delve deeper into his work, especially on his view of benevolence.
  7. Scott and I discuss Yaron Brook's debate performances and Craig Biddle's dialogue with Dennis Prager. We take a critical look at their different approaches to outreach and engagement with the opposition. I hope you get some value out of it, and thanks for listening.
  8. Our latest episode is on Woke Culture. We discuss the origins, ideas and applications of wokeness or wokeism. Check it out!
  9. We interviewed David Kelley about his history in the Objectivist movement, that time ARI tried to buy him out, and his view on open Objectivism among other things. I'm a closed system guy so we debated that issue a bit starting around 40:07. Check it out!
  10. Going all the way with the religious right doesn't lead to Nazis and Qanon. It leads to rightist groups defined by religious identity. But I'm not sure we need to associate with the fringe religious groups, it might be enough to work with or lend political support to mainstream ones that are friendly to Objectivists.
  11. Then I have a stronger argument, because I'm not arguing for a permanent alliance. You ally in order to defeat a common enemy. Once the left is crushed, there will be no need for an alliance against the left.
  12. That's not the disagreement. I'm not saying the religious right is not subject to mythology. Of course they are. I'm saying their mythology is primarily ancient in nature, and much of it isn't taken literally anymore. Whereas the left's mythology is contemporary in nature, and much of it is considered reasonable or scientific fact. No, there is a limit to how much they can change a myth, because it's written down in the Bible. The stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's ark can't change much since they are clearly told in the Old Testament. The left is inventing myths right now and they can make them up as they go along because they are hardcore subjectivists. Truth is whatever they want it to be.
  13. I can't find where Rand talks about it, but it sounds similar to "social subjectivism," which Peikoff describes in OP. The passage is excerpted in the Lexicon: These aren't myths though, they are actions. The myth would be the fantastic narrative for why they need to spend money and control business. Are you saying that it's possible the issue is fundamentally a leftist problem, but that you doubt it? Or is it evenly distributed between the right, left, and center, and thus not fundamental to any particular group?
  14. We have a couple new interviews up. Yesterday we spoke with actor Mark Pellegrino. You're probably familiar with him from his podcast with Rucka and his roles on Lost and Supernatural. We asked him about some acting stuff and some political/cultural stuff. And a week ago we interviewed two younger Objectivist activists, Ibis and Kudwy from the Aporia Institute. They make experimental videos on Tiktok and debate people on Clubhouse and YouTube. We had a fairly in-depth discussion about debating methods and social media.
  15. Our latest episode is an interview with Andrew Bernstein. We talk to him for over two hours about the religious right and the collectivist left, plus at the end we discuss his book on heroes.
  16. We uploaded UFOs part 2. This time we focus on the Navy pilots from the 2004 USS Nimitz incident and various issues with eyewitness testimony in general.
  17. It was a focus of Objectivists in the late '90s. Then 9/11 happened and the focus changed.
  18. Yes, it's important to grasp the left at an ideological-cultural level. But there is a division of intellectual labor in this effort. Some of us will be better at "fiddling with each issue" and some will be better at analyzing the "overall Woke framework." In any battle you need generals and foot soldiers. Generals look at the big picture (Woke framework) and form strategies and plans. The foot soldiers focus on executing the plans while dealing with particular problems (issues) on the field of battle.
  19. You could in the version where grammatical ideas are not dependent upon learning "walk," "run," etc. That's the whole point of the pluriverse: anything goes.
  20. Our new episode is about UFOs. We talk about the videos from the Pentagon and try to understand what can be gleaned from this evidence. We also do a bit of speculating on whether these could be natural phenomenon, or if from aliens, are they AI machines that try to avoid us for some reason?
  21. In this episode we interviewed Stephen Hicks about topics related to postmodernism and the left. Near the end I ask him about postmodernism's use of weaponized rhetoric, which is one of the more evil aspects of the philosophy.
  22. Maybe all the people thought that they were seeing angels were really seeing aliens the whole time. Does anyone have evidence that angel sightings decreased after Roswell? Regarding UFO sightings, this article says there was one at Mt. Rainier shortly before Roswell, which gave rise to the acronym "UFO." And this article suggests that people in Massachusetts witnessed a UFO in 1639, only they lacked the concept back then and considered it a light apparition. Given the recent UFO evidence, it seems possible that people mistook UFOs for angels or lights, perhaps even going back to ancient times. Who knows how long these objects have been flying around earth. Etymologically, "angel" means "messenger." In my KJV Bible's concordance "angel" is described/defined as "heavenly messenger." If we assume that UFOs are AI machines sent from an alien civilization on a distant world, perhaps they have been trying to communicate with humans for some time, but until now we couldn't even identify their machines properly, let alone fully grasp the message being delivered.
  23. In this episode I talk to Scott about his theory on the momentum of ideas in society and the problem of moral equivalence. We also touch on his view that life extension could be a unifying purpose for the liberty movement.
  24. Pelosi, Schumer--and Ron Klain probably has most of the power in the Oval Office. Biden is a second-hander who is failing mentally. He lets the people around him do the thinking and he signs what they put on his desk.
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