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A.West

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  1. I've known a handful of people in my life who got active with TOC. From my personal experiences, their support for TOC was not caused by "errors" or ignorance. They evaded evidence presented to them that TOC was destructive to Objectivism. Some seemed to spend more time studying the Brandens' attacks on Rand than on studying Objectivism. The philsophy was a floating concept to them anyway. Most of them, were recreational drug users, and rationalized away any indication that the impairment of reason was inconsistent with Objectivism. My personal experience with most TOC supporters has been that they wanted to talk about Ayn Rand without really understanding her philosophy, without practicing it, and without having their ideas or actions being judged by "buzzkills" like me. To me, the TOC has only one virtue- it draws people like these away from actual Objectivist events and activities, preserving their quality.
  2. Realitycheck, Leonard Peikoff, in "The Ominous Parallels," discusses in detail the bad philosophy in Mann's "The Magic Mountain" and describes how ideas like that paved the way for Hitler in Germany.
  3. REUTERS :March 2, 2005 "Ousted Hewlett-Packard Co chief executive officer Carleton ``Carly'' Fiorina has emerged as a strong candidate to become president of the World Bank, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing an official in the Bush administration." Fiorina's name wouldn't be leaked if she hadn't already been contacted and wasn't interested. If at first you don't succeed, try try again, this time playing the altruism card, within an organization that specializes in propping up mismanaged economies, funding so-called "market failures," and enabling government corruption. I have no doubt that whomever is appointed, there will be talk of "reform," and I am just as sure that the only true reform of the World Bank would be its closure. I can already picture the innumerable photos in magazines of Fiorina posing with poor third-world kids. No doubt this would look good on her resume, as a transition step into elected politics. I hope Fiorina's first big decision would be to have the World Bank aquire the IMF, (a la HP - Compaq) so that both corrupt institutions can fail together, though alas this is virtual impossible.
  4. For the record, my profile provides my name, Andrew My response was to Sparrow's assertion that Diana Hsieh's improvement means that TOC supporters cannot ever be morally judged. Because I don't know Mrs. Hsieh's case very well, I did not want to suggest that I knew with certainty that Mrs. Hsieh had ceased to support all the people whom I consider to be Objectivism's enemies (this list includes, Kelley, Branden, and Sciabarra, and various other lesser folks). As far as I've seen, however, Mrs. Hsieh has acted appropriately for the past year or so, and I do believe she was indeed young when she fell in with the wrong crowd, which is a mitigating factor in my mind. So in fact, I believe she has acted (as far as I've seen) in accordance with the path Dr. Peikoff thought that a moral person who discovered their error would follow. It is Sparrow who I believe is suggesting the incorrect attitude, to say that all TOC folks can never be judged, because some day they may discover their errors. That is where I was directing my criticism.
  5. I don't agree. I condemned Mrs. Hsieh and other TOC supporters while they were damaging the cause of Objectivism, because that's objectively what they were doing. It's good to see that Mrs. Hsieh has stopped supporting at least some enemies of Objectivism, and stopped retarding her own intellectual progress. But that hardly retroactively absolves her of past actions, and certainly does not make current TOC supporters less guilty of their continuing immoralities. The relevant section of "Fact and Value" is this: "Nor, when such youngsters drop out, do they say to the world belligerently: "Don't dare to judge me for my past, because my error was honest." On the contrary—and here I speak from my own personal experience of honest errors that I committed as a teenager—the best among these young people are contrite; they recognize the aid and comfort, inadvertent though it be, which they have been giving to error and evil, and they seek to make amends for it. They expect those who know of their past creeds and allegiances to regard them with suspicion; they know that it is their own responsibility to demonstrate objectively and across time that they have changed..."
  6. Hazing, as I think it's most commonly understood, is antithetical to Objectivism. I don't consider physically demanding boot camp "hazing". That's practice for real life dangers and rough situations military people may face. I'm talking about its most common variant, college fraternity or sorority hazing, or copycat versions, which involve some sort of submission of one's own good judgement to the will of the group one is trying to get into. Drinking too much. Getting beaten. Getting sexually molested. Getting tatooed or branded. Just to gain the acceptance of others. Keatings belong to fraternities, Roarks don't. This question has a no-brainer answer. Any group that asks one to suspend one's reason and judgement, and suffer for the sake of "acceptance" of a group, is not a pro-reason, pro-individual mind group. Now I'm not saying that an Objectivist could never go through hazing with his morality intact. Perhaps some Objectivists are so intent on joining the military as a career, that they are willing to endure some irrational torture in order to achieve higher goals. But an Objectivist could never be in favor of the process that is real hazing. I think far too often, hazing is all about forcing the individual mind to submit to the will of the collective.
  7. I just finished "State of Fear" and recommend it on a couple of levels. I think it works as a typical Michael Crichton adventure novel, which is why he sells a lot of books. On some levels it reminds me of Atlas Shrugged, and would not at all be surprised if he had read it (but not fully understood it.) The central focus of the novel (SOF) is epistemology. It is about the unraveling of a mystery, namely, how do you know that what "everyone knows" is true? The answer, generally, is that you know by exercising some independent judgement and verifying one's theories by checking the facts of reality. The main character is not particularly heroic, but I think Crichton purposefully put the main character in the same mental state of his typical readers - biased in favor of environmentalist propoganda, but open to learning through exposure to better scientific process. I think this character served to help guide the average reader along their epistemological upgrade, by mirroring the sorts of doubts, concerns, and realizations Crichton expects of them. The best result of the book is that radical environmentalists were portrayed as evil, anti-life, anti-science, primative, and malevolent. That's worth a lot, long term, and I hope this will strongly affect a lot of high school and college kids and lead them to challenge their years of school propaganda. As for Crichton's own views, they probably mirror Bjorn Lomborg's. Though he is "pro-science" and even seems to think the best environmentalism is private-sector, he shows some utilitarian leanings, and at least some amount of anti-ideology epistemological skepticism as well. And Crichton said at the end that, personally, his happiest days are ones spent in the wilderness, so he's not really too pro-industry and development, other than realizing that this helps 3rd world people out of poverty and early death. The intellectual hero was focused on showing people that they didn't know what they thought they knew for sure, which in effect turned a bit into an "anti-certainty" theme. On the other hand, the intellectual hero was very certain about numerous facts, including the fact that certain "facts" were not established scientifically. (possible mild spoilers) Other superficial similarities to Atlas Shrugged: There was also a mysterious character who brings a new, pro-factual worldview to several people, "converting" them to the opposition. And there was also a character who had to masquerade as something he wasn't in order to undermine the opposition.
  8. The "chickenlover" bookmobile guy promoted it to Officer Barbrady after he learned to read. Perhaps the bookmobile guy was a composite of freaky Libertarian fans of Ayn Rand that Trey Parker may have come across. (Possibly another example of the damage caused by Libertarians being associated with Ayn Rand.) "Cartman Joins NAMBLA" in season 4 was probably also inspired by exposure to Libertarian freakishness (South park is against NAMBLA, btw).
  9. South Park is my favorite TV show, but I have reservations about it. First of all, I like it because it makes me laugh more than any other show I've encountered. At it's best, the show satirizes things which really deserve it, and which nobody else has the guts to take on. I don't get offended by much, and find toilet humor funny. People who can be offended by anything, will be. For example, there is the well known "Rainforest Schmainforest" episode which parodied the use of kids for enviro-activism and ended with the following text scroll "Each year, the Rainforest is responsible for over three thousand deaths from accidents, attacks or illnesses. There are over seven hundred things in the Rainforest that cause cancer. Join the fight now and help stop the Rainforest before it's too late. " South Park has repeatedly attacked political correctness, environmentalism, animal rights groups, "new age" mysticism, and organized religion in humorous and meaningful ways. Just browsing through episode guides will tell much about what kind of content is in South Park: http://www.tvtome.com/SouthPark/eplist.html For example in the two episodes "Do the Handicapped Go To Hell?" and "Probably", they mock the Christian religion, the concept of Hell and Heaven, portray Satan as a relationship-dependent monster deciding between two lovers, the brutal Saddam Hussein, and Chris, a vegetarian 90's man in touch with his emotions. "Sexual Harrasment Panda," "Butt Out" and "The Death Camp of Tolerance" are examples of episodes with a common theme of the law intruding into private behavior. From the negative side: South Park is only good at tearing down negatives, not creating positives. The best characters are at best "normal". There are no uplifting or inspiring episodes. The episodes are purposefully offensive. South Park once had an idiot character criticize "Atlas Shrugged", while another idiot character promoted it. I think that Ayn Rand would have disliked a show like this, as naturalistic, crude, full of gutter humor, and anti-heroic.
  10. I second the "Good Riddance" motion. I suffered through reading both of his famous plays in High School or Jr High School, with a combination of boredom and disgust. Salesman conveyed malevolent naturalism and hopelessness pretty effectively. And high school teachers couldn't wait to use "The Crucible" to pounce on the McCarthyism theme, which was the real point of its inclusion in just about any curriculum. The malevolent universe premise, hopelessness, and naturalism of these plays is a strong argument against seeing them. I wish I'd never heard of them. Just thinking back 20 years, and reminding myself of these plays by looking at their outlines brings back memories of the disturbed, unlclean mental state Miller evoked. Yuck.
  11. The value of HP was created in its long history before Fiorina. The one day shows what the market thought of her as a manager, yes it is inexact, but directionally unmistakeable. The announcement that she was out added about $6 billion to the value of HPQ's total market value. (The Negative Six Billion Dollar Woman might become a new nickname for her here on Wall St.) That wasn't random chance. For five years (not short term) Fiorina had the opportunity to create value, and HPQ had consistently underperformed peers in terms of profitability and in shareholder returns. HPQ shareholders hired Fiorina to work for them, she didn't create the company, she weakened it, while using it as a platform for her own publicity. I've read many interviews of Fiorina in business publications, even one asking about philosophy influences. Never did I see any comment from her indicating any familiarity with or influence of Objectivism. I don't recall what philosopher she cited as an influence, but I recall disliking her response (maybe Plato, or Hegel). "You have to master not only the art of listening to your head, you must also master listening to your heart and listening to your gut." Said Fiorina I think Compaq was her indigestion talking.
  12. I have never liked Fiorina. Clearly the market didn't like her either, which is why HP stock jumped on the news of her ouster. Why don't I like her? 1. Someone close to me worked in Lucent in a position assessing internal risks and controls in the late 90's. Fiorina was head of marketing at LU before she jumped ship after getting passed over for the chairman job. She was responsible for the sales effort of the division that just a couple of years later got caught for bad accounting and business practices. Some people think she helped set the stage for this by setting unrealistic sales targets, not being reality-focused and thus not caring whether appearances matched reality, and then jumped out early enough to avoid getting the blame when it hit the fan. 2. Of the vast amount of interviews she's conducted with the media (she must have the busiest publicist of all CEOs), I've almost never seen more than vague generalities from her. (The equivalent of "the children are our future" for business, like "excellence is our number one priority"). She appears to only think and speak primarily in vague, "inspirational" generalities, yet still wants to micromanage things she doesn't seem to understand the details of. 3. Her management record appears to be one of long term value destruction, doing things at companies to make headlines and helping her get her picture on magazine covers. Publicity and fortune for her, eventual misery for shareholders. 4. The one big decision she bet the HP company on was dumb. So dumb that pretty much only the investment bankers collecting fees from HP, and her, tried to make a case for it. This was classic "empire building" with other people's money. Again, headlines for Carly and a bigger company for her to manage, value destruction for shareholders, and impossible goals set for employees. Acquisitions also allow for lots of accounting gimmicks that can spur short-term earnings gains, but even those got overpowered by the business cycle that Fiorina and other tech superstars forgot existed.
  13. If you want to read the book for the benefit of understanding the philosophy contained in the book, but find the negative characters bothersome, then perhaps take a different perspective. Read the novel while remaining conciously aware of the fact that these are all fictional characters, and that each one represents a certain philosophy and/or psychological state. Identify the archetypes as such, and turn it into a philosophical exercise. I think you may benefit from introspecting further about why you don't feel motivated to read The Fountainhead. I noticed you commented that "rarely pick up novels, as I'd rather be learning about something." I guarantee that if you read The Fountainhead, you'll be "learning about something." I don't want to be too harsh, but glancing at your background, I would recommend that if you want to understand Objectivism, reading and writing posts here is infinitely less fruitful than reading The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, say, twice each, and then following up or mixing this with Ayn Rand's non-fiction. Reading the Voice of Reason and 60 pages of The Fountainhead is, quite simply, insufficient to form an integrated understanding of the Objectivist philsophy. And reading posts here, where it is generally assumed that all readers are familiar with the events and characters of the novels (and many other things), has probably already resulted in multiple plot spoilers that could further reduce your enjoyment of Ayn Rand's novels.
  14. Here are a couple of satirical quotes I like: "Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses." and "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." both by Menken Also an obscure quote from South Park "Gerald: You see, Kyle, we live in a liberal, democratic society. And Democrats make sexual harassment laws. These laws tell us what we can and can't say in the workplace. And what we can and can't do in the workplace. Kyle: Isn't that fascism? Gerald: No, because we don't call it fascism. Do you understand? "
  15. Whoops, my own memory wasn't adeqate. It wasn't Bentley, it was Rolls Royce, who until recently, simply stated horsepower as "adequate."
  16. I recall that the automaker, Bentley, maker of some of the largest and most luxurious yet powerful cars, rather than specifying or boasting of engine horsepower, simply listed horsepower as "adequate." I think Ayn Rand's IQ could be similarly described. Adequate, for creating a revolutionary and true philosophy and the best novels written. She had all the intelligence she required to accomplish her goals.
  17. Check out the reading list of this NYU professor (I took one of his classes a couple of years ago) http://www.stern.nyu.edu/eco/courses/Finan...History2003.htm http://www.stern.nyu.edu/eco/courses/Sylla...istSpring02.htm I've only read excerpts from the Timberlake book, but understand that he's very antagonistic to central banking. The Robert E. Wright book provides some little known details about the relatively unexplored 1780-1850 period. I'd expect all of these can be found at the Bobst Library, so you can scan them all to see if they've got what you're looking for. (Caution, there are more than 1 economists named "Robert E. Wright"). Sylla's own essays tend to focus on interest and money, but he's a central banking enthusiast, unfortunately. I cannot recall exactly which books contained what, because Sylla put a lot of readings into his coursepack for the Financial History 2003. Richard Salsman's publication "Breaking the Banks" has a good history of banking in the U.S., good ideas on why and how to end central banking, and a good appendix with references to other works about U.S. economic history.
  18. Drinking even 50 cups of water a day would probably be a health hazard. I knew a really nice Objectivist group organizer in St. Petersburg, Florida, who owned a major coffee distribution business. I think he drank something like 20 cups of coffee a day, and he was a real coffee enthusiast. I met him when he was in his 50s or 60s, and he was a rapid speaker and quick thinker. After a heart attack, he had to cut his coffee consumption down to a couple of cups a day. (He may have had a heart attack even if he drank no coffee, however). But he definitely believed that coffee is a healthy drink, good for the mind, an aphrodisiac. From what I've seen, the latest scientific studies suggest that green tea is more of a health enhancer than coffee, however, so I'm drinking about 5-8 cups of that each day. For me, I find that my choice of breakfast and lunch has a bigger impact on my mental clarity than how many cups of coffee I drink. I did drink extra coffee before most of my big life-significant tests (SAT, GMAT, CFA) and did pretty well on them all, so I give coffee a thumbs up.
  19. I'm so glad that I did not have DPW's skills in creating sexual encounters with women when I was a young man. Otherwise I would for the rest of my life be regretting the multiple sexual relationships based on few or no shared values, the hearts I would inevitably and unnecessarily have left broken, and the many stark mornings feeling sickened by the sight of a postcoitally unwelcome visitor. To a teenage boy or young man, the ethics of "American Pie" might seem to make a lot of sense. With time and maturity, one comes to understand that the relationship is the key element of a sexual relationship, not the sex. I'm surprised to hear comments that indicate that some young women are increasingly beginning to see sex as a semi-anonymous recreational activity. I suppose I'm a "puritan" in the sense that I do want to keep myself morally pure, part of which, in my opinion, involves reserving sexual relations only for those who have earned with their virtues such a relationship. (And I do not categorize "looking sexy", and "being drunk and flirtatious" as virtues.) FYI, I recall Leonard Peikoff once commenting on the topic of multiple romantic partners in a pretty old Q&A tape on Objectivism. His take, as I vaguely recall it, was something to the effect that it's not appropriate to have a romantic relationship with multiple people just because they each have one or two good qualities.
  20. Labrat, On whether Chinese culture paved the way for Communism, In my paper, I noted some features of philosophic systems that I think helped set the table. Here is the briefest outline of my thoughts on this: Confucianism - I think this boosted the ethical regard for collectivism and duty, and thinking of oneself in relation to others. There was also a Confucian scorn for merchants and profit. Taoism - contibuted a false alternative of pseudo-individualism, and epistemologically reveled in the acceptance of contradictions, which I believe set the stage for dialectic theory, and a low respect for Aristotelian - type logic inthe culture. Legalism - though a dead philosophy, the first emperor created an apparatus of repression, dictatorship and statism that never really went away. The Chinese culture has never abandoned the ethical mandate to serve the state/emperor. I think your perspective is on the particulars of Communism as practiced in China and how they conflict with specific Chinese cultural practices. I agree there are conflicts there. My perspective is on the Chinese culture's big picture compatibility with collectivist movements and their ethical/epistemological underpinnings. Similarly, while Communism in Russia violated and broke with traditional Russian practices and customs, it was not inconsistent with Russian culture overall. Which is why I think Ayn Rand would have left for America even if the revolution never happened.
  21. The Chinese in the West are likely to be the best from China. My wife was driven to be the best in her elementary school, so she could get into a good high school, to be the best in her high school to get into a top university (People's University), and then to be the best in her department, in order to get a scholarship to a US university, which 12 years ago was one of the few tickets out of China. One positive aspect of China's ancient and current bureaucratic structure was the ability of people to move up by doing well on tests (though the method of education was bad - rote memorization of floating abstractions). This is a big reason Chinese parents push their kids so hard. One cultural downside to this is that the emphasis is "to be better than everyone else" rather than "be the best you can be." My wife has been adjusting her subconscious orientation from the former to the latter since being introduced to Objectivism. Anyway, my wife's family was starving when she was a kid, and she and her sister both worked like crazy, with virtually no resources, to achieve educational and professional success in China then the U.S. At least in my wife's case, she has nothing but contempt for any lazy poor person in the U.S. who would demand a moral claim on our money, particularly considering that even in inner cities the standard of living and opportunities are 100 times what she started out with, and that they are making the decision to throw their lives away.
  22. Pericles, Communism was in many ways consistent with Chinese culture. My wife is from China, and on our first date, just after she had finished reading Atlas Shrugged, I asked her what was the primary philosophical cause of Communism there. Her answer at the time was "Confucius." Communism never arrives by accident. In the years since, I continued to try to gain a better understanding of Chinese culture. It is full of contradictions and there are many individual exceptions, but after many years I satisfied myself with how its culture tied to its history. Also, your socialist friend is very poorly informed about China. There are lots of beggars, and hordes of people who are essentially peasants serving their local party boss, being exploited much in the way socialists claim that capitalists would. China's forms of pseudo-capitalism (e.g. poisonous knock-off drugs and food, people-selling, government-run- sweatshops, massive corruption in the financial, construction and property industries, pull-peddling) involve things that both Capitalists and socialists dislike. A couple of years ago in a small town, the Communist Party bosses put 8 year old kids to work making firecrackers to "earn" their pitiful "free" state education. Then the school blew up, killing lots of kids, and the party pretty much covered it up, blaming the incident on the village idiot. If that had happened in a capitalist country, this would have been on the front pages of newspapers for weeks, and the left would have started a movement behind it. Instead the world yawned, Beijing paid off the peasant families, the Chinese press semi-covered it up, and the case was closed with a tearful "mistakes were made" speech by a senior leader who never said exactly what these mistakes were or who made them. What story could make clearer the fact that it is the communist Party that is "exploiting the people" in China? Some months ago I posted an essay about China in this forum. It combines business/economics/cultural analysis. It's not "Objectivist" but I included some philosophical/historical points that I think would be meaningful to Objectivists. The "terracotta warrior" theme is disposable, imposed upon the students by a professor who demanded that kind of "thematic" background. There were a few items I disagreed with provided by my classmates, but I edited out most of them. I'm trying to attach a link to the essay here: http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.p...type=post&id=73 Incidentally, to answer an earlier question, Ayn Rand is known to a few people in China, but unless there's been a recent change, not many. I stumbled across a Chinese professor now in Canada who read Ayn Rand's works and published a summary in a Chinese literary journal. Here's part of a correspondence he sent me: "... I came across Ayn Rand's works around 1987, when various, at times radical and subversive, theories, philosophy, concepts, ideas and values from the West were "invading" (or being introduced to) China - which, in a sense, led to the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. As China was intellectually more open, academically freer, economically capitalized and privatized, politically somewhat de-centralized, and ideologically and morally disintegrated, a young generation of "intellectuals" was trying to make sense of the chaotic reality by looking deeper into the Western experience of history, modernity, and postmodern conditions. I read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Virtue of Selfishness." I was fascinated with her interpretation of moral issues. I thought it would inspire lots of Chinese who were being torn between traditional, Confucian, and Communist moral standards (basically collectivism and altruism), and the new reality of capitalism (individualism). I translated "The Virtue of Selfishness" into Chinese, and wrote an introduction to Ayn Rand and her works to an editor from a prestigious state-run publishing house, who was very interested. Unfortunately, the 1989 Incident took place, which put the publishing process on hold. From 1989 to 1992, political and ideological control was tightened. Then China joined the international copyright club. This meant there was no way for the translation to be published. As far as I know, Ayn Rand is known to very few people or a small circle in China, a country that is now dominated by popular culture. I'm not sure whether the younger generation is even interested in philosophy..."
  23. I have Objectivism through Induction. I highly recommend it, but it may not be what you think it is. It takes on fundamental epistemological questions, and guides you to the proper way of thinking, but it is not oriented towards making you a better student per se (other than the general benefits one gets from having a proper understanding of the theory of knowledge and of Objectivism). I found it useful in building my own hierarchies of knowledge, and I happened to listen to these lectures right before taking a highly rationalistic course in Finance, and it helped me to identify the flaws in methodoloy of some theories presented to me. I think it may also be a good antidote to the rationalism that young Objectivists often exhibit.
  24. I think there's nothing wrong with RPGs in principle as a hobby or recreation. In fact, it would be very interesting for an Objectivist to write modules (preferably for a non-mystical game) posing moral dillemmas concretizing the Objectivist philosophy. In that case it would be a form of interactive fiction. Nevertheless, I think the points that Ayn Rand made in "An Open Letter to Boris Spassky" apply, potentially even more strongly to RPGs than to chess. See: http://www.chess4all.org/Articles/Fischer/ol_to_bs.htm
  25. I played a good bit of AD&D (v.1) from 1983 to about 1991, Jr. high through college. I think young people sometimes use this as a way to project what they would like to be, develop fictional heroes of their own, hypothesize moral decisions, etc. I learned a bit about probability, literature and vocabulary, and public speaking in the process. It's a way to socialize, like a party with food, drink, and dice and paper thrown in. I also saw role-playing as a way for teenage boys (mostly) to engage in one-upsmanship. Practically every character in my group was designed to dominate the other players. Overall, I'd say role playing is an excercise with some positive features, but the risk is that it absorbs too much time better spent advancing one's values in reality. Some people also use role playing as a form of escape from reality, where fake accomplishments in a non-existent world replace real accomplishments in the real world. Looking back, I wished I'd devoted more of that time of my life to Calculus or computer programming or other useful study. I always saw AD&D's Chaotic-Good alignment as being most compatible with Objectivist ethics. People I played with would only choose Lawful Good because they had to to get the bonus abilities that Paladins won. BTW, I also played Call of Cthulu, Rolemaster (a good system that few played), and a James Bond RPG, back in my teen years.
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