Ninth Doctor
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Posts posted by Ninth Doctor
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7 hours ago, HandyHandle said:
The NYT article says that Carl Barney “admits with some embarrassment” of “dabbling briefly ... in Scientology.” Anyone know about this? Do you think it matters?
Matter how? I have a friend who was a dyed in the wool fundamentalist Christian for decades before becoming an Objectivist. He has a certain background he can draw on, that matters, in a sense. I don't hold it against him, I don't think that would be right. You could even say it's to his credit.
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4 hours ago, Jackethan said:
Doctor, do you have a citation on the Binswanger account?
Follow the links:
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Maybe it's Kerry O'Quinn that you're thinking of.
http://kerryoquinn.com/ayn_rand.html
As I recall it was Harry Binswanger who said she softened her views on homosexuality later in life.
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You might give this book a try:
The author is a very distinguished professor who is also an Objectivist.
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Sounds like you don't have the passion required to become a writer. Not at this time. Howard Roark knew he had to be an architect, do you feel that way about writing? I don't sense that you do, not even close.
So I'd steer you towards the business option. Andrew Carnegie advised spending the first third of your life acquiring knowledge (education), the second accumulating wealth, and the last giving it away. Leaving aside the last part, it's good advice. Hopefully you'll find what turns you on later, and will look back on the 10 years you spent as well spent, not wasted.
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On 1/21/2017 at 11:25 AM, DonAthos said:
Is this true? Just on a factual basis, is it true that the US was the first nation to outlaw slavery -- that outlawing slavery was "something never achieved before in all of human history"?
Even Russia freed its serfs before the US ended slavery. At least the US beat Brazil to the punch.
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Looking through this thread I note that not even Peikoff’s Mullet (love that handle) has gotten around to aping his namesake and denouncing atonal music. He’s been known to class Schoenberg in with James Joyce and Wassily Kandinsky in his roll of dishonor. Deliberate destroyers of legitimate art, and even of the conceptual faculty.
And, if we go back to art, there is liberated music, such as the atonal stuff of Schoenberg, which dispenses with harmonty and melody, and offers instead an unintelligible series of agitated dissonances. The new music, said Schoenberg, and I quote:
“represents the emancipation of the dissonance.”
In other words, noise lib.
Pity he couldn’t work in an accurate explanation of what Schoenberg meant by that. How about a sample of atonality in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFXkc9AGoeU
Maybe if you want to evoke the horror of the Holocaust, atonality is just the thing. Of course the soundtrack to Schindler’s List pulled it off too, in its own way. The point is that atonality is simply a tool, and even the composer of Schindler’s List has it in his kit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuQUEz8gkyw
There it’s only for about the first 30 seconds. There are some tone clusters in there too, later, but Peikoff hasn’t gotten around to denouncing them yet. Well, at least not that I’ve heard.
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3 hours ago, JASKN said:
Decent Objectivists (some of whom you follow around on the internet) don't care about what you write because you do it in a rude way.
Well I suppose I'm either not Decent or not an Objectivist. IMO he's not rude, but relentless. He starts polite, and if you keep it polite he'll match your tone all the way. He's certainly given a few wind-bags some badly needed deflating, particularly on the topic of aesthetic judgement.
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You can listen to Peikoff's lectures on Kant for free here:
https://campus.aynrand.org/campus-courses/history-of-philosophy
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On 7/30/2011 at 1:36 PM, Ninth Doctor said:
Beyond that, imagine if you could lose your paycheck for critiquing a statement like “Doctors who perform sex change operations are the moral equivalent of Nazi concentration camp doctors who experimented on inmates. Without qualification”
On 3/26/2016 at 4:16 PM, Harrison Danneskjold said:... What?!???
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What is your opinion? Should I quit the business school immediately and search for a true passion?
Seems like you're prompting for the following advice:
A cautionary tale: A friend of mine kept changing his major and ended up with a big student loan balance. For whatever reason he ended up having to finish a degree (any degree) by a certain date, and it wasn't in the field he wanted. It hasn't done him any good in life/career.
I suggest (on admittedly limited evidence) that you finish your degree. Unless you have something specific, e.g. you have an idea for the next Facebook, drawing you away and it's something you have to do RIGHT NOW.
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Nathaniel Branden's Six Pillars of Self Esteem ought to be your first stop.
http://www.amazon.com/Six-Pillars-Self-Esteem-Definitive-Leading/dp/0553374397/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1438260125&sr=8-1&keywords=nathaniel+branden -
Robert Tracinski has done a piece on this that is bound to change some minds.
http://www.tracinskiletter.com/2015/07/what-the-planned-parenthood-case-isnt-about/
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Re the OP, here's something I wrote a few years ago:
Consider the 1680’s, when John Locke was writing (but unable to publish) his most influential works, in exile from the Catholic James II, while Louis XIV was revoking the Edict of Nantes, and witches were swinging in the Massachusetts of Cotton Mather. Fast forward 100 years and it’s unthinkable that you have the founding of the United States, where freedom of religion and the press are part of the founding principles. The point is that big changes can happen, ideas are vital to those changes, and history is very unpredictable. As is the future.
http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=22063&p=278209
I should have mentioned that Germany was still smouldering from the aftermath of the 30 Years War. And the Turks were on Vienna's doorstep. You think we've got it rough?
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All we learn is that there was a drug deal gone wrong. That’s the setup. They all killed each other. The “money-man” was wounded in the shoot-out and got away on foot, dying later under a shade tree, where Moss finds his body and the money.Unless I missed it, who killed everyone where the drugs where located, who killed the money-man, leaving it behind?
Indeed. He figures out that Chigurh didn’t use a gun. But he doesn’t figure it out right away. What’s wrong with that? Even Hercule Poirot (sometimes) needed to exercise his “little grey cells” across a chapter or two.Tommy Lee explaines a number of points to the younger investigator earlier in the movie, but finds the explanation about an entry wound and no bullet did not make sense.
Later, he's talking the young wife in the restaurant and mentions how slaughter cows have improved to use a pneumatic device that plunges and pin in and retracts - but it never seems to get tied in deeper than that.
Yeah, and that’s the kind of thing that ought to “turn your brain on”! C’mon, this is like complaining about Chekov’s Gun on the grounds that you sat through the play wondering if it was ever going to be fired!It's little things like that which you sit wondering who or when are these questions going to be answered or interconnected.
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After watching No Country For Old Men, the loose ends and disconnected presentation was disappointing.
What loose ends? I thought it was quite a good movie. Strong "malevolent universe premise" to be sure, but I feel that way (contra-Rand) about a lot of Victor Hugo. I recall that the movie did leave open whether Chigurh ended up with the money, and whether he killed the wife. In the book the answers are yes and yes; I don't know if it needed to be spelled out in the movie, I think it works either way. Best I recall the "presentation" was linear, albeit punctuated with tangential scenes of Tommy Lee Jones talking with characters unrelated to the plot. Those conversations tie in thematically, however. By "disconnected presentation", are you thinking of Tarantino, specifically Resevoir Dogs and P ulp Fiction?
In any event, I don't think Cormac McCarthy (or the filmakers) wanted you to turn off your brain during the film. From what I hear the Transformers movies are a better match for your thesis:
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Give Feldenkrais a try:Can any of you recommend something to read?
It's about posture and body image. I jokingly call it Jewish Yoga.
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The episode began in '53. She completed the novel in '57. Hmm. — Nah. Journal entry October 30, 1948 Decide on new role for Ragnar Danneskjold. [Note added the next day:] The Robin Hood who robs the humanitarians and gives to the rich.
1955 according to Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Robin_Hood_%28TV_series%29
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FWIW, by the time this TV series was being aired Rand was working on Galt's Speech, and presumably the Robin Hood scene was long since in the can.
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Lew Rockwell.com featured an article entitled Robin Hood: Why Ayn Rand Got It Wrong
. . . In one of the most memorable passages of her novel Atlas Shrugged she has one of her major characters, Ragnar Danneskjold, condemn Robin Hood in the harshest and most vindictive manner.
But Rand got it wrong.
What crap. Harshest and most vindictive, eh?
This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness. It is said that he
fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the
meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a
champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the
first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving
away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Part II Chapter VII
Reminds me of another Lew Rockwell piece which, in effect, critiqued the title of her talk America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business by cataloging real life Orren Boyles. Do they think no one actually reads the material?
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Looks like it was one sided. Another poster gone from the board...
Who, me? Or the other guy...whatever.
I'm still around, just not so often.
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Here's an excellent post on the connection, or more the lack thereof, with Kant:
http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=15028&p=226196
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One may think that this retreat from game theory is motivated by some radical-left agenda. Not so. The major influence here is Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who taught us that the rational and the free escape the empire of expediency by doing what is right.
How do we know that our modest policy agenda, which constitutes our red line, is right in Kant’s terms? We know by looking into the eyes of the hungry in the streets of our cities or contemplating our stressed middle class, or considering the interests of hard-working people in every European village and city within our monetary union. After all, Europe will only regain its soul when it regains the people’s trust by putting their interests center-stage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/opinion/yanis-varoufakis-no-time-for-games-in-europe.html?_r=0
I find myself looking forward to some able Objectivist writing a reply that explains: No Greece bailout because…Aristotle. Hopefully it won’t be an intellectual embarrassment that misrepresents Kant. Honestly I don’t even see the connection to Kant in what Varoufakis wrote.
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Here's a new article from Taleb on the relative fragility of various international states. Very interesting, as usual from him:
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142494/nassim-nicholas-taleb-and-gregory-f-treverton%E2%80%A8/the-calm-before-the-storm
For countries, fragility has five principal sources: a centralized governing system, an undiversified economy, excessive debt and leverage, a lack of political variability, and no history of surviving past shocks. Applying these criteria, the world map looks a lot different. Disorderly regimes come out as safer bets than commonly thought—and seemingly placid states turn out to be ticking time bombs. [...]Those countries that score poorly on multiple criteria are particularly concerning, since these markers are compounding: qualifying as fragile on two counts is more than twice as dangerous as doing so on one.
Carl Barney and NYT article
in The Critics of Objectivism
Posted
I checked the article and that line is not a quote. So it's the reporter's characterization. Though good chance it's an accurate characterization of whatever Barney said. In which case he's probably embarrassed by it and wants to minimize it. Or wants to forestall readers from associating his success with his time in Scientology. There are plenty more or less innocent explanations. Though this is rather like a person who attended seminary and was ordained a priest in their twenties, dropped out when they stopped believing in God, and then 40 years later said "yeah, I once dabbled in Catholicism".
Nevertheless, I just don't see any big deal here.