Reidy

I haven't been following this thread, but I found an essay that has some interesting insights, by an author who seems to know a lot about both the esthetic ideas that were current in Rand's youth and the movies of the period.

A shorter answer to the objections you raise in #1, and that others have taken up in detail, is that this is the situation we have anyway with government schools (especially the one about a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty); might as well save the money.

If D'Souza thinks that this talent (writing fugues) or that (building cathedrals) makes its possessor an authority on religious matters, I'd expect him to be willing to extend this principle to politics. Sean Penn, Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep are great actors; ergo, by his lights, they are authoritative on political questions such as abortion.

On Certainty is accessible to a nonspecialist (like me). Wittgenstein's aphoristic style makes the book easier to get through in small pieces than a systematic treatise would be. His choice of a trip to the moon as an example of impossibility is not the happiest, but if you think of it as a trip to the moon by familiar terrestrial means it all falls into place.

My objection is that this lends material support and prestige to the Chinese government. A publicly-traded company may have no practical choice in the matter, but that doesn't imply that one ought to admire them. The standard argument in favor of commercial dealings with dictatorships (not necessarily your argument) is that it opens these countries up and leads them toward freedom. It was tried out as far back as the Eisenhower era, and it never had the predicted effects.

If they didn't do so much manufacturing in China, where the corporate tax structure is apparently more compatible, I'd admire them.

If it was a satire it was not a successful one, at least in the case of the pseudo-Rand. The author was clearly trying to put it over as authentic.

Christianity, with its emphasis on the individual soul's worth regardless of status or nationality, seems to have been a necessary condition of the discovery of individualism fully understood. That doesn't mean that it's a good defense of individualism. The medicine, technology or astronomy that prevailed in earlier centuries were necessary steps on the path to where we are today, but that does not make them worth practicing in preference to what we have now. Taking up the point Ninth Doctor makes in #15, if it were a sufficient condition, mature individualism would have emerged when Christianity was fully dominant and not after it had lost its monopoly.

I suspect that if somebody had invited her she would have been pleased to accept, as she was to attend the Apollo launch. She would have ascertained carefully who else would be on the line, and she would have pulled out on finding out that Yoko Ono would be there. Since Lennon was still alive in 76, they would have invited him, not her. The technology of the day would have entailed a visit to an ARPA installation (a university or a military site), but that was doable.

One reason to doubt the authenticity of this is that three of the four participants are extremely famous, and we would have heard of this event decades ago if it had actually happened. Another is that the real Rand's grammar and usage were impeccable, and this one's isn't. Those are not the only reasons. If AI were more powerful than it is, this is what a program might come up with if you directed it to imagine a conversation among these people. Or maybe if it had taken place in a different language and you applied a spottily-accurate machine translation program. (Later PS: a statement, however sticky its phrasing, that the conversations are an invention: http://www.arpanetdialogues.net/disclaimer/)

How does losing mean a better chance of winning in the future? Unless you have some elaborate rope-a-dope strategy going on, this strikes me as the exact opposite of the truth.

The real way to tell who wins is to wait a few months after the event. Either some Objectivist organization or some conservative organization will be posting it the debate on YouTube, selling the video, offering it as a new-members premium, etc. The other side will be hoping nobody remembers it.

One that I can recommend is Wittgenstein's On Certainty. A technique he points out is to ask the skeptic or solipsist What would change your mind? What evidence would move you to admit that you're wrong?

I see you as starting a b&d consultancy and cashing in big time on the success of Fifty Shades of Grey and Harvard College Munch. Practice saying "Obey me this instant or you can lick my shoes clean! The trouble with this world is people who do what they feel like doing instead of doing what they're told!" in the right tone of voice, set yourself up to accept credit cards and you're off and running.

Did you know that people have been pondering this question for almost seventy years?

She'll soon enough be working for herself, and the question will be moot. She probably won't hire intellectualammo.

The Zimmerman prosecution is collapsing almost as quickly as Rice's prospects as Secretary of State. Give Zimmerman the job and make everybody happy.

Kay Nolte Smith, Erika Holzer and Shelley Reuben are some others who were members of Rand's circle. Smith and Holzer wrote articles in The Objectivist, and Reuben was a typist on Atlas Shrugged. I read most of Smith's novels and found most of them unimpressive. The exception is A Tale of the Wind, one of my all-time favorites by anybody. It's a multigenerational epic of the nineteenth-century French theater. Elegy for a Soprano is fun as a roman à clef about You Know Who (transformed into the titular diva), but hokey as a mystery. Holzer's An Eye for an Eye became a movie with Sally Field. Neither this book nor Double Crossing was a hit with me. Nor did I like Reuben's Weeping. She gives her protagonist a lot of foibles and weaknesses that do nothing for the story. My surmise is that she was doing this in order to get out from under Rand's literary shadow. Lots of interesting technical detail about arson detection.

"[M]aking a comeback"? Did she ever go away? Though I've never made a formal study of book sales and media mentions, my impression is that her popularity and influence have followed a fairly steady upward trajectory over the decades, getting steeper in the last few years. The notion looks to be quite as far off the mark as the one popular in the 60s but still abroad as late as 2004 (Buckley's Getting It Right), that Rand was a passing fancy whose writings and ideas have no future.

Rand was a great admirer of Calumet K by Merwin and Webster, early 20th-century pop novelists. Some of their books are available through Amazon, some of those for as little as nothing at all on Kindle. I prefer The Short Line War to Calumet K, and Comrade John is my favorite of them all. I suspect it's where Rand came across the idea of architectural ghosting that figures in The Fountainhead. They wrote many more, singularly or together, which you can find in print or online with the help of a search engine. She was also a fan of Noel Coward, whose plays are blissfully free of any philosophy at all. He was the model for Winston Ayers in Her Second Career (in The Early Ayn Rand), and The Fountainhead alludes briefly to Design for Living. LA people will be happy to learn that the Pasadena Playhouse is doing Fallen Angels in February (if you aren't local, don't hesitate to travel from the ends of the earth).

I don't quite understand it. In any case, a single statement is at most an assertion, not a theory. The latter requires appropriate evidence and argumentation.

Has there ever been a purely pictographic written language? I can't imagine how it would work, any more than I can imagine a spoken language in which all the words denoted palpable, particular entities.

If it were an enforceable written contract that hasn't reached its expiration date, you might have a of breach of contract; I don't see that fraud would figure in. As I understand the law, one condition of having an enforceable contract is a quid pro quo: the other party (Norquist's organization) should have given something up when Chambliss did. The surest way to decide such a question is to take it to court.

See #16 and The Passion of Ayn Rand.

Branden talked candidly and at length about these issues in two autobiographies, Judgement Day (the vain, vindictive version) and My Years With Ayn Rand (the make-nice version).