Reidy

Nobody should be surprised to see Atlas Shrugged recommended as a source for what Rand had to say. Anne Heller points out that the story, quite literally on the first page, salutes the skill of a bus driver. This scene leads straight into a dialog scene between a VP’s personal assistant and the company’s CEO in which the assistant clearly understands the company’s situation better than the CEO and cares about it more. Not long after that is a chapter entitled “The Top and the Bottom” which (unfavorably) contrasts a bunch of corporate higher-ups in a bar with the aforementioned assistant and an unskilled laborer in the company cafeteria. One could go on and on in this vein. Rand preferred as a novelist to write about people of extraordinary character, talent and accomplishment. In her novels, as in life, these qualities correlate imperfectly with money and status. The world would offer fewer storytelling possibilities (less conflict, less surprise) if the two matched up well.

I didn't read everything in Euiol's link, but it looks plausible. Cases like this come up at some school or other every few years. Usually they involve a popular teacher denied tenure rather than not rehired for a non-tenure-track job as Coward was. I have no trouble believing that the guy is a showboater who plays to his students' vanity or who teaches undemanding mickeys. As the others have mentioned, we'd have to know more. If somebody is like Roark then he's likely to be as unpopular initially as Roark was and as Coward evidently is not. Do we have any way of measuring the quality of his teaching? This might be his students' performance on standardized tests vs. the performance of other students taking the same courses from other teachers in the department. To do this really rigorously you'd have to assign them at random. Another measure might be performance in more advanced math courses. This is not an exhaustive list, but popularity with students strikes me as a less reliable measure than either of these. (I wonder how he would have compared to the Unabomber.) Is he related to Sir Noel?

You shouldn't make a habit of it. On the other hand, you're well out of that one. Somebody as vindictive and bad-tempered as this guy would be hateful to work for.

As you describe the issue it looks like a job for a pro. You'd be prudent to talk to a therapist about this; it's an issue they often treat. I wish you success in the venture.

Rand is in some big-name literary company.

Depends on what you mean by "recently". I'd pick the founding of the ARS/APA in 1987 as the symbolic date for her ascent into academic respectability. Some might question whether this was an ascent or not.

Thank you for the lead. It's an interesting interview with some presumably new information (haven't read 100 Voices) but some inaccuracies as well: - Rand came to the US in 1926, not 1925; - The house was razed to build a housing tract, Buckingham Estates, not a shopping center (though a big mall is nearby, and Kurisu doesn't, strictly speaking, say this, only that she'd heard it); - McCarthy had nothing to do with HUAC and its movie hearings; - Rand survived lung cancer and died of heart failure seven years later. The music was probably Prokofiev - Love for Three Oranges march - not Shostakovich.

I'm interested to see that at least in this case the Jews are trying to claim her as one of their own. Ferber clearly wanted a pretext, any pretext, to talk about Rand; a 69th anniversary is a flimsy one. Her statement that academics don't take Rand seriously is inaccurate.

What you're pointing out is that getting at the truth can be hard work, that we must go about this work deliberately, that we aren't guaranteed success and that this insight needs to be applied to any particular question such as the ones you point out in #1 and #3. Objectivism doesn't dispute any of this. We all might hope rationalistically that a single breakthrough will do the job once and for all and make any further intellectual effort automatic, but this hope is in vain. If you can read and write you've made these efforts yourself, and I wish you the best at your further adventures.

Individual or group therapy, rather than reading, might be right in the situation you describe. It's more expensive, but it can be a better buy. (It might also give you English practice.) Writings on cognitive therapy might also help. David Burns and Aaron Beck are some big names. Cognitive therapy teaches patients to identify the erroneous beliefs that they act on and to question them.

Yes. The shareholders have, by buying in, authorized the corporation to sign for them. The entire point of corporations is that the shareholders have assigned responsibility to the corporation.

"Abhorrent" here is a fancy synonym for "distasteful". That is as much as all of us (who aren't physicians, dentists, nurses, etc.) can agree on. If you intend some more morally-freighted notion, then we don't all agree. A physician can discuss surgical procedures casually over lunch without missing a beat (though I hope Nucatola didn't have any scheduled for that afternoon). The rest of us couldn't, and that is where the videos get their dramatic impact. Do I really have to remind the present audience that our emotional reactions prove nothing about the facts under consideration?

A chicken feels pain when it is killed. Most people do not conclude from this that a chicken has rights. I'm with you about government money. Commercial sale is illegal; whether taking reimbursement for expenses amounts to a sale under those laws is a legal question that we can't answer by stating our opinions extra-loud. What's in the videos is abhorrent. Most medical and surgical procedures are abhorrent to people who aren't in the business of delivering them.

The principal rationale for limited liability corporations, whereby shareholders don't normally bear personal liability for the acts of a business, is that more people have money to invest than have the time and expertise to run a business. The alternative is that all businesses would belong to their upper managers and that the capitalization of the world economy would be limited to those managers' personal assets. If people make such a contract, they are the ones who created the new entity, not the government that recognizes and protects the agreement, any more than government creates marriages, bond issues or residential leases. My understanding is that, historically, people were making limited-liability agreements before legislatures wrote laws acknowledging such agreements explicitly. Robert Hessen's In Defense of the Corporation has a good reputation for explaining this at length, though I haven't read it. . Some minor points: - Shareholders lose when a corporation loses; in the normal course of events the price of their stock declines. - Shareholders usually get some of their money back as dividends without having to sell their stock.

The original question mixes two quite different issues. If your potential customer is incompetent - psychiatrically impaired (your example), underage, brain-damaged - then taking his money in a deal he isn't qualified to make is reprehensible whether or not you're matching the best available price. Such a deal is unlikely to stand up legally, and this customer's parent or custodian should have been paying attention. Without this special circumstance, your customer was free to shop around. Instead he outsourced the job to you. Economics calls this practice (charging different prices in different circumstances) with the concept of elasticity of demand. The shopper who spends hours a day searching newspapers, junk mail and the web looking for bargains will probably spend less money than the shopper who decides he has better things to do with his time. A flight from one airport to another is the "same" product if you buy it a month in advance to fly in February as if you buy it two days in advance to fly in the week before Christmas, but you pay much more for the latter. A restaurant may sell a given meal at any hour, but it's more expensive at night than at lunchtime. And so on. Value is a relational term. It's value to a particular buyer in a particular set of circumstances, not an intrinsic property of the good or service.

I'd like to donate, but I can't find the button, either by visual inspection or by text search.

Historically, at least in the pop culture (though not in LeTourneau's case), we've had another double standard: sex between man and an underage partner is pervy and criminal, but between a woman and a boy it's charming. Tadpole (more) is a case in point.

I don't think so. It simply says that some deaths are like this and that Wynand does not expect his to be.

The claim under examination is either trivial or false. To say that the universe is itself is to take the first alternative. If you could show that there are two, then the two of them together would be the universe, and what you were looking at first is not the universe. To say that the universe is a particular entity simply because "the universe", "existence", "being" and the like function gramatically like the names of entities, is false and gets you into philosophical trouble: where in space does it end? when in time did it begin? (most notoriously) what cause brought it about? Such quandaries vanish when you give this supposition up.

Welcome to OO. Yours is an unusual path, as most of us started with the novels. Do you see much interest in Rand in Poland?

Churchill was fired for scholarly fraud. See Research Misconduct Investigation. The jury finding that #31 mentions was vacated. Virtually everything in this thread assumes that CU fired him for his opinions and is thus off the mark.

Yes to the first question, no to the second. Humans are a species with specific properties and specific ways of being benefited or harmed. Selfishness and unselfishness apply to actions or to characters - to what we choose - and not to what we are born with.

I chimed in yesterday that metaphysical rebellion as #3 explains it is characteristic of Rand's villains. They are in full revolt against one fact about the human condition: the necessity to make a deliberate effort to think and to act on the results. (I thought that Rand was the only one who used "metaphysical" this way, but apparently Camus does too. Some authors use "existential" to mean the same.) ((How metaphysical rebellion applies to clothes in an intriguing speculation. No head openings. Three legs. Two right shoes. Wrong for the weather. Bras for men and jockstraps for women.))

Never saw this phrase. Can you tell us what it means?

Here we go again. 1 2 3 Or search on "arctic ice-free 2013".