bnittoli

i'll be moving to NYC soon as well. looking for apts this weekend. will likely be in the downtown/financial area. hopefully, i'll have something to move in during april. will definitely be up to meeting others. we have a small group here in CT that i'll miss.

Here are a couple excerpts. i found them in lexicon, but copy/pasted from the O'st research CD-ROM reprinted in the new intellectual, The Nature Of The Second-Hander, from a conversation between Roark and his friend Gail Wynand, in which Roark explains what he has discovered about the psychology of those whose basic motivation is the opposite of his own. "Isn't that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison .... they're second-handers .... "They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: 'Is this true? They ask: 'Is this what others think is true?' Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egoists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation—anchored to nothing. That's the emptiness I couldn't understand in people. That's what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It's everywhere and nowhere and you can't reason with him. He's not open to reason. You can't speak to him—he can't hear. You're tried by an empty bench. A blind mass running amuck, to crush you without sense or purpose .... " from VOS, argument from intimidation. A social metaphysician is one who regards the consciousness of other men as superior to his own and to the facts of reality. It is to a social metaphysician that the moral appraisal of himself by others is a primary concern which supersedes truth, facts, reason, logic. The disapproval of others is so shatteringly terrifying to him that nothing can withstand its impact within his consciousness; thus he would deny the evidence of his own eyes and invalidate his own consciousness for the sake of any stray charlatan's moral sanction. It is only a social metaphysician who could conceive of such absurdity as hoping to win an intellectual argument by hinting: "But people won't like you!"

Yah, this is one of those articles that is so messed up in so many ways, it's hard to know where even to start. Note his total misunderstanding of the "Second-Hander" concept thinking it means everyone who isn't a Galt or Roark.

Not sure if this is correct forum. New York Times has an article about Ayn Rand noting that it's the centenial of her birth. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/books/02rand.html fyi, the times requires free registration to read articles.

If you haven't already, you should start by reading Ayn Rand's essay "The Ethics of Emergencies" in The Virtue of Selfishness.

sorry, not on your question, but that thumnail looks to be a Steve Hanks. I have 2 hanging on my wall myself, though not that one. see attachment. I discovered Hanks through a O'ist as well. I wish i had something to say on relationships, but that area of life has alluded me as well. cheers

Before I learned about O'ism, I took a class in my psych major called "investigating paranormal activity" and used one of Randi's books (Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions) as a textbook. It was taught from the small s skeptical perspective and debunked many of the popular notions of horoscopes, faith healing, ESP, etc. Basically, the class was a excersise in applying the scientific method to a particular claim or ability. The funny thing was even though we debunked everything, the prof half-heartedly joked that we could probably make more money using what we knew to pass ourselves off as mystics rather than scientists. I didn't want to go that route of course, but i did play a joke on one of my friends, telling him that i took a personality course where we learned how to draw conclusions based on pure observation. I spouted some jargon and then handed him my "assessment" of him which was really one of those "vague, applies to everyone" horoscopes. He was sweating as he read it, muttering nervously, wondering if i had hired informants to spy on him.. hehehe.

ugh, my little inch thing didn't work. the second set of lines is supposed to be the distance of an actual inch. **** vs **************

I would think the only role gov would have in terms of rates would be limited to keeping the exchange rate constant as in standards/measurements. 1 dollar = 1 oz. of gold (or whatever) and keep it there. It's up to the market to decide how much 1 oz of gold buys of a particular product/service. "A dollar" is just an abstraction. It's the objective amount of gold that is being traded. If they could change it rate, it would be as useless as if they could arbitrarily redefine 1 inch to equal | | instead of | |.

congrats on BA. It is pretty common to do stuff with friends, buy something nice, or treat myself to a dinner, but sometimes it's nothing all that unique or even planned. Sometimes, I would be doing a simple activity I typically enjoy, but it takes on a special significance due to the fact that I just accomplished something huge. For instance when I finally finished my Masters thesis, I dropped off the manuscript to Kinkos and went next door for a slice of pizza and a beer while they made the copies. I've had pizza/beer many times before, but just sitting there, enjoying my lunch, free of writing the thesis was very satisfying (cause i finished it, rather than quiting like i almost did at one point). A couple months later after I began working and had moved to a much nicer place, i went for a bike ride along the coast. It was late in the afternoon on a sunday and suddenly I had this wave of dread that i had to get home and work on my thesis, but then realized i was free, living on the beach with a great job, and i could ride as long as i wanted, deserving every second of it.

My first Ayn Rand book was "The Fountainhead", but i read OPAR before that. I would have continued with the non-fiction first, but there were so many references to the fiction, i switched gears and read Fountainhead and Atlas before returning to the non-fiction.

I don't care for his New-agey eclectic stuff, with a couple exceptions, but I very much enjoy his piano based "classical" pieces. I have his "live at acropolis" disc and program in just those and find them very moving and uplifting. If i'm in crappy mood, the tracks below can usually shake me out of it. #3 (until the last moment), #6 (one man's dream), #8 (nostaligia), and #10 (reflections of passion). A couple others #1,5,7 are OK, but i wouldn't cue those up specifically.

Not a lot of details in the story yet about the north korean train collision that might have killed 3000 people, but the description of their infrastructure sounds an awful like the series of events that led up to destruction of the Comet and Taggart Tunnel in AS. Not that I'm surprised.

"Capitalism Forever" summed up what i was initially going to say. I reckon that an adult who has believed in afterlife all his life, it is emotionally difficult to deal with the reality of a finite existence for many reasons, but not the least of which is he can no longer be comforted when someone dies by the phrase "well, at least she's in a better place". And not only for future deaths, but retroactively for all the people who may have died and was comforted by the tired bromide. Knowing that they are truely gone and you'll never see them again (and vice versa) has got to be hard to accept, if you've believed the opposite all your life. I started having my doubts about religion in general very early and the first time a close relative died when i was 12, i was already pretty sure there was no god/heaven/etc. I was upset, of course, but i accepted the fact that she was gone forever, and i didn't decieve myself in thinking that we would meet again in the hereafter.

This is one of those policies that really test one's principles. I lived in CA for 6 years and they passed their ban not long after i moved there. i was against the ban based on the business owner's right to set the conditions for his business, but i got very used to smoke-free establishments. i moved to NY just before they banned it, and i was so overwhelmed by the smoke the first time i went out, i had to leave early. Now i'm in CT and they just banned it here. I'm still against the ban and state my opinion when it comes up in conversation. Smoke-free is great, i just wish it could have been acheived through persuasion rather than force of law. I wrote this short piece back when CA was passing their ban. I was new to Objectivism and just getting into writing about such issues. http://home.earthlink.net/~bnittoli/pragmatic.html