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Ninth Doctor

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Everything posted by Ninth Doctor

  1. This just made me remember, the reason he was stubborn about keeping the dildos in the window is because she did call the cops. All they did was talk to him, I gather there was nothing they could do about it. But naturally, if you run a headshop you don't like seeing cops coming in to the store.
  2. I have a funny story related to this. A friend ran a headshop on a busy street near where I live. His inventory naturally included glass bongs, but I gather that the people who make those also make glass dildos. Big, eye-catching dildos, on display in the window to shock the passersby. So, there he is, running his store, paying his rent, doing well; there’s a smoothie place on the one side of him, and the other space is vacant. Then some brilliant entrepreneur gets the bright idea to open up a children’s clothing boutique in the vacant space. A couple months after she moved in, she starts complaining about the dildos in the window. Anyway, long story short, the landlord didn’t have the power to demand the dildos be removed, and my friend wouldn’t remove them on principle. When his lease came due, the landlord raised his rent by the maximum possible, effectively shutting him down (he also has a strip club, he does ok). The children’s clothing store went bust before long. Both spaces sat vacant for quite a while afterwards. Even the smoothie joint went bust. A lose, lose, lose situation. At least the state didn't get involved.
  3. I agree with Jonathan. I’ve had enough posts deleted that I’m much less interested in contributing. I gave up on the “closed system” thread for that reason, my next reply needed to be extensive, and it didn’t make sense to put in the time since the content would have to be very controversial and thus subject to being deleted.
  4. I see him as Prince George and/or Bertie Wooster. His novel is terrific, BTW.
  5. I gather Reverend Dudley wrote a review of The Fountainhead, if so it should be interesting to read. It’s not entirely clear, early on she refers to a lecture, then at the end she refers to a review. Could it be that Rand was carefully putting a spin on her ideas to not alienate someone who could “give it a larger circle of readers”? It had been out 6 months when this was written. When I was in college I went through old bound copies of the New York Times (when I should have been chasing tail) and I believe I looked at The Fountainhead as it went up and down the bestseller list. If memory serves, by 6 months it was doing very well, and it sat near the top for a long time. I really don’t find it troubling, I was surprised that’s all. People’s ideas evolve. Now, to reconcile this letter with the thesis of Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World, that’s another matter. I created the thread within minutes of first reading the letter. I was feeling stunned. It does go beyond, let's say by one order of magnitude, any of her other potentially pro-Christian writings. The letter to Sylvia Austin is all about why Roark is different from Jesus, while the letter to Reverend Dudley is about how her morality does reconcile with Christianity.
  6. Here’s the ebay listing, it sure looks like a reputable seller. http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220842770782#ht_2874wt_1233 The signature looks fine to me (mine varies much more), but if there’s a dispute there are experts who can confirm it came from her typewriter. In the Soviet Union that was a big deal with samizdat writers like Solzhenitsyn. There was a terrific German movie called The Lives of Others where a secret typewriter is a key part of the plot. I think the views she’s expounding aren’t too different from what you find in Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane, and she was friends (sisters in arms?) with them at this time. I think it’s authentic, there’s no serious doubt about it in my mind. But how else to authenticate it? Since it's not in Letters of Ayn Rand, do we presume that it's not in the archives? If it is in the archives, the next question is unavoidable: why was such an intellectually important letter left out? What else was left out?
  7. Hat tip to Robert Campbell, this was on Ebay recently. It doesn’t appear in the Letters of Ayn Rand, I just checked. “I believe my statement of man’s proper morality does not contradict any religious belief, if that belief includes faith in man’s free will.” Ayn Rand, October 23, 1943 http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/randtodudley102343p1.jpg http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/randtodudley102343p2.jpg http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/randtodudley102343p3.jpg
  8. There's premarital sex, and quite a few ribald jokes. Plenty to "obsess about". Young teenagers these days watch South Park and listen to gangsta rap. Atlas Shrugged is incomparably tame in the "adult sexual scenes" department.
  9. Can you define raw materials? Do you mean like oil in Alaska? There are royalty payments (ultimately a tax by another name) that go to the state, which in Alaska's case actually get passed on to the taxpayers. Anyway, the overall answer is going to be: it depends. What kind of business? What kind of tax? Federal, state, local? Income, excise, employment, property, franchise...damn now I'm getting a headache, this is the weekend after all. I gather you're not looking for professional literature, but if so CCH is who I generally use, they're very reliable for accuracy, though not geared at all to layman's readability. This may sound crazy, but you ought to give Wikipedia a try.
  10. Wow. I’ve got to say, I wasn’t expecting that answer. I’ll try to weigh in again tomorrow. It’s great to have a long weekend.
  11. Here's the Dawkins one I mentioned. I should warn you though, some of the other speakers get boring. http://richarddawkins.net/audio/721-1986-oxford-union-debate Make a beeline for Dawkins part, he does righteous indignation like no one else. A YouTube search should serve for the other people I named.
  12. Again, if you don’t define "open" accurately you can’t define "closed". These are metaphorical images of opposite states, so one may as well contrast red with blue, while calling it black and white. It isn’t going to sway anyone who knows what white is. However, it’s an interesting statement he makes, does it mean that any principle which, falsified, does not “collapse the system” is what? Not part of Objectivism? Does this mean that Ayn Rand’s definition of Art is not part of Objectivism? I’m interested if anyone will argue that the metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and/or politics of Objectivism would collapse if a different view of esthetics were substituted. Say, Aristotle’s, or Pseudo-Longinus’s. I gather Peikoff does regard her esthetics as part of the system, since he included it in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Just what does “collapse the system” mean, anyway? Reason and Egoism are toast if it turns out that Government can’t be financed by voluntary means? Examples are needed. I suspect Peikoff is overreaching. Kelley doesn’t define it quite this way. His “isolate the essence” exercise is about first stating the broad fundamentals, then determining what is distinctive in Rand’s thought. However, he does spend time on certain essential connections, so perhaps they’re not completely at odds with each other here. Note, however, that not for a second does Kelley deny that Objectivism has identity, Peikoff's charge “It’s all subjective, it’s whatever you want” should have one of those Wikipedia "citation please" notes next to it.
  13. You want me to critique his definition of closed, but not his definition of open? These are metaphors, and each concept exists only because there is an opposite. Let me ask you, how well does Peikoff's definition square with Kelley's exercise of "isolating the essence" of Objectivism?
  14. Yet he misrepresents his opponents, and makes no effort to establish the context in which the dispute arose. “It’s all subjective, it’s whatever you want”? What a steaming pile of crap. He’d have to change his methods radically, if he planned to convince anyone familiar with the actual arguments of the other side. I grant you though, strawmen haven't got a chance against him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOKK8mAkiUI
  15. I don't follow. Are you saying that other than Clint's character, you think that these Leone films are brilliant? What's the last sentence supposed to mean?
  16. I think some more history needs to be hashed out. In what context, and for what purpose did Ayn Rand create the name Objectivism for her philosophy? David Kelley rightly points out in his oft linked lecture that we don’t need a special name to refer to the works of a particular author, we just refer to the works of that author. So, why Objectivism? The term first appears in the preface to For the New Intellectual, dated October 1960. At that time Nathaniel Branden Lectures had been going for a year plus, he was named her “intellectual heir” in the afterword to Atlas Shrugged (since deleted), and his first book Who is Ayn Rand? was forthcoming the next year. He had express authority to speak for Objectivism, citation available if there are doubters. I don’t think I need to spell it out much further, it’s pretty simple: she thought she had a solid partner, and thought they would be creating a school of philosophy. Didn’t happen, or, it did but it only lasted about 8 years. Hence, Objectivism. Kelley goes to the trouble of providing quotes and citations, thus building a case, while Peikoff demolishes a straw man, and hardly bothers to pack him with any straw at all. The mystery is why one of them continues to have adherents and defenders.
  17. Here was a really funny one, though it's not really a debate. Thunderfoot has another one out there where he's up against a creationist, and he's simply not a good debater at all. He's made some really good videos though.
  18. You mean on YouTube? You ought to give Michael Shermer a try. There's one with Richard Dawkins from the mid 1980's where he's really on fire going after creationists, but it's audio only. You might try looking for opponents to then find interesting challengers, for example Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig are active debaters who are usually on the opposite side of, well how to put it, the right thinking sort. I say "usually" because there's one with D'Souza vs. Robert Spencer where my sympathies were squarely with D'Souza. There was, never published to my knowledge, a debate between Harry Binswanger and John Ridpath vs. Christopher Hitchens in the late 80's early 90's. In most such debates, that is capitalism vs. socialism with Objectivists on one side, the opponents don't do their homework and the two sides just talk past each other. The Peikoff debate (I assume you mean the 1984 debate against some Canadian socialist politicians) was like that. Reportedly Hitchens did his homework, and the result? The person who told me about it heard the tape at a conference, and he would always put a spin on this kind of thing, so let's just say: I gather Hitchens surprised them. Have you tried the debates with people from Demos? There was one with Yaron Brook, and a couple others.
  19. I think I’d better make it clear that I was trying to frame the issue, not provide a summary of either side’s stated position. Peikoff wouldn’t accept the characterization of studying Objectivism being like going to a museum, nor does Kelley claim that Objectivism equals Philosophy. In the talk I do recall him saying something like “I think everything that’s true is (or should be) part of Objectivism”, but he also goes to some length in “isolating the essence”, this in the context of describing what an Objectivist “movement” should be like. In practice, both have produced work that “goes beyond” Rand, in the sense of being on subjects she didn’t address. So what’s the real difference? I think l’affaire McCaskey is a great illustration, and that really had little to do with the open/closed question. I say the lesson there was: when Peikoff makes a new contribution, the book it’s in is not to be criticized, not even behind closed doors.
  20. There’s a very recent Peikoff podcast bit on drugs, where he acknowledges that his own work has been chemically enhanced. http://www.peikoff.com/2011/08/15/can-the-use-of-drugs-such-as-benzedrine-or-caffeine-ever-be-morally-sanctioned-for-example-in-the-pursuit-of-extremely-mentally-taxing-work-requiring-a-high-degree-of-long-term-mental-focus/ Michael Stuart Kelly has written quite a bit about addiction, if that’s what you’re interested in. http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=40
  21. I’m not advocating anything, I’m pointing out a flaw in Rand’s suggestion. The same basic problem applies to lotteries, it doesn’t work unless private lotteries are outlawed. Government financing is the glaring gap in Rand’s political theory, and I don’t have the answer to it.
  22. Huh? I suspect you left out a word, maybe two. For my part, I'm surprised that one doesn't hear of many more letters like this one.
  23. It doesn’t have to be, not in principle. You could have something like the current system of competing credit agencies, and getting a bad mark with them would put you out of business. Assuming it’s cheaper to go with the agency that doesn’t render unto Caesar, who’s going to win? I know of a case (the son of someone I worked for) who cannot get a bank account, because he was once involved in check fraud on a big scale. It’s not the Government keeping him from getting one. I don’t have anything to add about encryption, but one other point is that Rand’s suggestion was a tax based on the value of the contract. So, whatever that means, sounds like a nightmare of legalese to define (think VAT), but it’s not single rate in her conception. Interesting implication of the splitting the cost idea, you could have a contract that’s only enforceable by one side.
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