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Reidy

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    Peter Reidy
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    Aesthete: Bach, Sibelius, Wright, Garbo, Dietrich, Piaf, Coward (as well as the obvious) foremost. Francophile malgré tout.
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    Since high school (1961)
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    Philosophy and classics, UCLA
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  1. Isn't rosin what string players use to prep their instruments? You might try a music store. If music be the food of love, play on.
  2. They may not write Anthem, but they do a lot of speechwriting for Harris and Biden.
  3. One online, from the Wallace interview:
  4. The closest statement that comes to mind is in The Anatomy of Compromise, where she says that in a contest between opponents who share a basic premise, the more consistent one will win, and that is not very close. The opposition you describe, between one's advantage and one's convictions, strikes me as un-Randian.
  5. Reidy

    A Song to Reason

    Sophocles expresses a similar sentiment in Antigone (Jebb translation): strophe 1 Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, the unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year. antistrophe 1 And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull. strophe 2 And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when 'tis hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come: only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes. antistrophe 2 Cunning beyond fancy's dream is the fertile skill which brings him, now to evil, now to good. When he honours the laws of the land, and that justice which he hath sworn by the gods to uphold, proudly stands his city: no city hath he who, for his rashness, dwells with sin. Never may he share my hearth, never think my thoughts, who doth these things! Carl Orff, best known for Carmina Burana, turned the play into an opera. This chorus starts at 36:10. German text; search on zweiter akt
  6. No. What is encompasses objects to which color doesn't apply one way or another, such as the cube root of 16 or the taste of lime juice (not an exhaustive list). Limiting the question to objects that have color, if all of them were the same blue (so far as the eye can tell), we'd have no concept of color. If all of them were one blue or other, we'd have no concept of blue. Your remarks on primary substance, too, suggest, that the universe or reality is identical to the physical objects and materials within it. If we limit primary substance to physical objects, the question arises: if the notion is not to be vacuous, reality must contain something that is not primary substance; such a contrast is indispensable to an understanding of what primary substance is. What then, is this other stuff?
  7. I'd never heard of this one, so I'm relying on Wikipedia. Objectivism has never much bought into the necessary / contingent distinction, so we wouldn't expect them to have much to say about its consequences. To judge from what the article says, it looks like a version of the familiar philosophical mistake of treating being, the universe, what is and the like as if it were a particular entity. Thus, people figure, it must have a beginning in time, a boundary in space and (most notoriously) a distinct entity that brought it about, when none of these follow. Applying the principle to this argument, we can imagine that a particular being didn't come about, but not being itself.
  8. For the most part this is straightforward salesmanship, good advice. It carries a risk, though, that the salesman had better be ready for. Once you get past the one-on-one conversational stage (and sometimes if you haven't) your audience is going to find out what you're saying elsewhere. If you didn't put your principles and their consequences out there explicitly and the audience finds out, you are going to look duplicitous. If you're pushing private school tax credits in Alabama you needn't play up open borders at the expense of your actual cause, but you had better get ahead of the inevitable.
  9. Can we infer anything from the fact that the movie pointedly doesn't tell us that Cortlandt is government property? Keating asks Toohey for help in landing the commission because "you know people in this game", not saying what game that is. When Roark comes back from his trip and sees what has happened to his design, the owner's representative says "you can't sue us", not saying why. The reason, as far as the viewer knows, could have been that a lawsuit would be too expensive. The point seems to me to be that Rand was not interested in pushing a political message and found it dispensable when she had to strip her story down to a practical running time.
  10. Do you have a citation for the Aristotle quote - i.e. a particular location in his writings? Google and Bing find others who have quoted the words but none (in a quick perusal) who tell us where he said it. He wasn't much for first-person statements. He might say, e.g. By 'F' I mean... as an alternative phrasing of The definition of 'F' is..., but he didn't go in for autobiography. If the statement means that performing a particular act voluntarily is more desirable than performing it under legal duress, it's true in some cases, such as not killing or lying. At the same time, people do a lot under legal duress that wouldn't be admirable if they did it freely, such as paying for the UN or for political indoctrination in the schools.
  11. May 24: Historically destructive hurricane season in 2024. 1 2 3 4. The reason (say 1, 3 and 4): global warming. September 24: It didn't happen. The reason? Global warming.
  12. If you want to cite Randian authority, the place to look is The Cashing-in: the Student 'Rebellion'. There she writes about the situations where one can properly break the law. One of these, she says (and tradition agrees), is to bring a test-case. He waited to be arrested. He never denied his part. He was willing to go to jail if the verdict didn't go his way. His case is more broadly symbolic than a challenge to a single law would have been, but it counts just the same.
  13. Cyrano is another case in point. She wrote a wheelchair-bound character in Think Twice. (Off-topic: I wonder if we can conclude anything from the fact that the great ugly-outside / beautiful-inside stories - the Hugos you mentioned, Cyrano, Beauty and the Beast - are all French.)
  14. One rarely encounters readers who wish that Rand's novels contained more speeches than they already do.
  15. Yes, I think you're right, though I haven't read the novel in a long time. This is a matter of literary economy. We hear the prosecutor's opening statement, and that's enough to let us know his strategy and his arguments. The trial turns on questions of abstract ideas rather than of small particulars; whatever we need of the latter we get from the testimony of the security guard or from the previous events of the story. The Night of January 16 depends more on such particulars, and we learn about them from the testimony. You make an interesting point, one that had never occurred to me.
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