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Dan Edge

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    Dan Edge reacted to Steve D'Ippolito in Peikoff on date rape   
    Well, then, you should have said something like "clearly Dr. Peikoff mis-spoke" rather than try to maintain that there was nothing wrong with what he said because the words didn't mean what they meant simply because Dr. Peikoff spoke them.

    In point of fact you are continuing to deny what the stated words actually mean. I am not expecting you to agree that LP endorsed rape, but refusing to agree that his statement _sounds_ like such an endorsement, however incredible you may have found it coming from the source it did, is just willful blindness.

    Here's an analogy: Someone asks a noted astronomer how far away the Andromeda Galaxy is. He responds, "Two million miles." This answer gets published in a podcast. People point out the error, saying that the correct answer is two million light years and the astronomer is mistaken. Maybe a bunch of creationists even gloat--"See! even a noted scientist has admitted the universe isn't that old; Andromeda is only light seconds away!" A defender of the astronomer says "Well, he knows it's two million light years, so his statement that it was two million miles clearly really is a statement that it is two million light years." And when people point out, "Well, he actually did say it was two million miles" you ram your fingers in your ears and insist the people are wrong, because of what you are sure the astronomer meant to say.

    That's precisely what I meant by a reflexive defender of Leonard Peikoff. He made a mistake here. It's likely that he will admit such and correct it, trivializing the matter in so doing. But you have insisted he never made any mistake. (That is different from asserting that Dr. Peikoff is not in fact immoral, a statement which I could be persuaded to agree with, especially after I see the retraction.) You are also looking forward to the effect the correction (of the non-existent mistake?) will have on people who, you claim, want it to stand as proof that Dr. Peikoff is immoral. Oceania is at war with Eurasia, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

    I am ambivalent to a lot of things Dr. Peikoff has said (and never retracted) over the past few years.

    I am utterly appalled at people who will go over logical cliffs defending statements that LP will ultimately retract when their actual and inadvertent semantic content is pointed out to him. In the end this whole incident is going to end up saying very little about Dr. Peikoff, but it is very instructive about the sorts of people, like you, who will defend everything he says no matter what the statement actually is.

    edit: Included quote from the individual I am responding to, and adjusted some capitalization and punctuation, altered last sentence.
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