Steve D'Ippolito

The difficulty begins where one party thinks the error (or perceived error) is so egregious or fundamental the other party is not, in fact, an Objectivist. Then you have people proclaiming themselves to be authorities on what is or is not Objectivism, and they may or may not be holding to a very strict notion. (It can be just as much of an error to be overly inclusive as it is to be overly exclusive.) In the end, though _all_ of this is fighting over taxonomy, not over whether or not the person is actually right or wrong. I am becoming more and more reluctant to use the word "Objectivism" on myself not because I think I have fundamental disagreements over it, but because I am sick of the wrangling over what the term means, and tired of watching people spend time over the issue of whether so-and-so is an Objectivist, rather than whether they are correct. As soon as I apply the label to myself I expose myself to the potential of some back-biting clown attacking me for using the term improperly. It is fortunate, in a sense, that Objectivism's influence in the culture is limited or I'd also risk guilt by association in the eyes of non-Objectivists (oh, yeah you are one of _those_ guys who snipe at each other over trivia). That having all been said: Leonard Peikoff corrected himself, as I thought he might. I don't think the correction goes far enough. I also don't know whether he considered his wording any more carefully than he did the last time, though. So what am I to do? I guess, I can safely say that if his last statement actually matches what LP thinks, re. withdrawal of consent during intercourse... LP is wrong, and badly so.

I've seen instances where uncivil posts were deleted and in many cases disapproved of the deletion--simply because the fact of the incivility is sometimes instructive. Fortunately in at least one case where I was on the receiving end someone had already replied to, and quoted from, not one but two uncivil posts before they got deleted, and I was able to use the person's nastiness to bolster the very point I was making.

He has admitted to behaving in this way with regard to the Kobe Bryant/"Date Rape" issue, so it is certainly not unknown. Is that what he was doing here? Admittedly, an entirely different question.

Assholes.

It's also true that the way the forum software is now, you are "encouraged" to look at threads even if not interested in them... or oftentimes you won't know if you are interested until after you open the tab. (There's a way to "mark as read" without reading the thread but it's buried on some menu somewhere instead of being a prominent button like it used to be.) So many of the thread views may have been non thread reads, or "Oh, that's what this is about, never mind."

It is a very good counter-argument in fact. Tsarist Russia was in the same situation as the US, moving into a vast, resource rich area with relatively little opposition from the previous inhabitants. The history of Russia in Siberia is as hair-raising a tail of genocide and exploitation (hell, outright slavery) as anyone might try to paint for the US. Yet they didn't progress as much as the west, and they weren't free.

(In Response to Chris S's summary which posted while I was composing my previous post) If all he is saying is that the man has the right to wonder about the rationality of a woman who says stop after intercourse has started, I can agree with that. I wouldn't agree with any sort of statement that the man has the right to continue because the woman is an irrational flake. I am not sure what he's trying to say here though. I certainly agree with the notion that someone cannot _retroactively_ withdraw consent, deciding the morning after that on second thought, they didn't want to have sex with the man, so it was rape.

Aequalsa, IMHO the standard you want to apply here might apply to an informal conversation that gets recorded, or perhaps a gaffe during a Q&A that gets recorded, stuff that is truly extemporaneous. It makes no sense for stuff that is recorded well in advance before being released. Dr. Peikoff is not just speaking to people who will pick at and find fault with everything he says, he is also putting himself out to be the best spokesman and authority on what Objectivism is and consequently speaking to an audience that hangs on his every word. Under circumstances like that one ought to be careful what one says, and especially so about what one publishes in an archive. Of course everyone will make mistakes even so--but that in turn implies one ought to clarify themselves--quickly and unambiguously--whenever they accidentally make a statement that makes it this easy to misconstrue one's real position in a matter like "When do things cross the line into rape?" If it had been me, I would have been horrified on reading the plain text, I would have immediately put verbiage on my website correcting what I had said, and I would have made room in the following week to issue a short clarification (for those who don't read)--bumping other content to future podcasts if necessary. Obviously Dr. Peikoff disagreed with me about the urgency of this--and that's not necessarily a moral failing. I have not yet listened to the podcast or read any sort of transcript so I cannot evaluate Ninth Doctor's implication that Peikoff may still be stating a bad position.

Although I agree with the thrust of your criticism, something is wrong here. You quote their claim that condition H is a "necessary condition to have a right to X." You then argue against their claim but construing it as if they had said it was a sufficient condition. They are claiming condition H plus possibly others, but definitely condition H (that's what is meant by necessary); your counterexample proceeds as if they claimed that condition H alone was enough to claim a right.

Sorry but I simply CANNOT resist:

Thunderf00t has been known to go on socialist rants. Definitely no Objectivist, but I find his material quite entertaining. I find it appalling that the "hate speech" standard is being applied on YouTube. It can be abused by Muslims to ensure that there is no criticism of Islam or Muhammad, and (oddly enough) that happens to be part of sharia law.

You ought to do a lot more than that. People who paid attention to you back then may not be doing so any more... in particular the people who de-friended you over Checking Premises. Figure out who has in fact listened to you and proactively find them and tell them you were wrong on an individual basis. Yeah that's a lot of work, but you did a lot of f*ckup.

Congratulations. You have shown yourself to be a better thinker, with more integrity, than I had previously imagined. Given that your hangup over this issue seems to have been a key contributor to your conclusion that CP was doing right and good in attacking Diana Hsieh, what do you now think about CP? Edit: cleaned up grammar, clarified my ending question.

Slightly off topic, but do they also do a better job of maintaining their carts? I just love it when I get one with a flat spot on a wheel (wham wham wham wham wham as I go down the aisle) or a cart with such a strong steer to one side that pushing only on the opposite corner still won't get it to go straight and I have to push on one side and pull on the other. At least in theory, at a place that doesn't make me put in a quarter, I can bring the cart back and get another one when this stuff happens.

I know this is not quite what you are referring to but an atmosphere with a lot of free oxygen in it would be a good indication not just of life, but life that has learned to photosynthesize, and has been doing so long enough that dissolved iron and dead organic matter has absorbed all the oxygen it can. This took 1.4 billion years after life started (or 2.4 billion years ago) here on earth; that's when oxygen began to accumulate in the earth's atmosphere. (The very first photosynthesis was probably about 3.5 billion years ago, or 0.3 billion years after life started.)

I imagine at some airports, people make a fair amount of cash returning carts left behind by others in too big a rush.

Because greed does have a negative connotation, I tend to use it in the instances where people want something so badly they will use unethical means to obtain it, or will otherwise let their judgment be clouded. Desire or selfishness should be reserved for acquisitiveness well within the bounds of ethical behavior (and even "selfishness" I will not use in front of a non-Objectivist unless I know they know what I mean by it). I know words have specific meanings and we should abide by them. I also know that words are used to communicate, and in furthering that purpose, I won't intentionally use a word that I think my interlocutor won't understand correctly.

Ah, but that's precisely the point. There seem to be legions of people who do not make this distinction, and to them disagreeing with a Peikoff opinion (no matter how outrageous that opinion might be) is "bashing" him. Of course the same people are incapable of admitting that a Peikoff opinion, or even a misstatement of a Peikoff opinion, could either be a misstatement or outrageous.

My ex-GF used to laugh at me for wanting to actually return clothes I had decided not to buy to their proper places. This in stores that have so many things stocked in the wrong places that she had just expressed her frustration with THAT fact.

I remember reading a rant somewhere about people who didn't take their carts back, thereby blocking parking spaces, etc. This rant really laid into the people who left them back, calling them rude, inconsiderate, etc. One response was from an irate parent who was downright phobic that her child would be kidnapped while she was off returning the cart!

I am frightened to see what the health care system would be like in the hands of someone like Santorum. He won't have to ban abortion or contraception, just get the government-assimilated medical industry to stop providing them. Right now we are seeing the Catholics scream because they are being expected to provide something they don't believe in, but what happens when the shoe is on the other foot and a crazy Catholic is in charge? This should scare the bejeezus out of the left, but yet they still want Obamacare. They seem pretty confident that they will always be in charge.

Rats!

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.

Well, good then. Here, I think she might be pandering by going out of her way to imply these terms are inappropriate, but I am not sure one way or the other--she may be referring only to those cases where the terms are aimed at LP personally. The statement, on the other hand, was indeed disgraceful and disgusting; that's why it was problematic. Whether those adjectives could be applied to LP personally and not just the statement, depends on whether he made the statement by mistake or whether it accurately represented his views. A correction would establish not only that the statement was a mistake, but that LP is moral enough to correct his mistakes, and will make the whole incident have no negative moral consequence. Two other possible scenarios: 1) If LP made the statement mistakenly but for some reason failed to correct it, I would consider it immoral; he's letting stand a statement that makes him look bad and that is surely not in his interest. 2) If he meant what he said, then he is hugely immoral. Where I am going with this is: no correction indicates some form of immorality on LP's part. Interesting, though, that some individuals chose to reflexively defend the statement, denying what it clearly meant, apparently because of its source.

Given that they are prone to doing proxy wars, and would, judging by their rhetoric, be more than happy to engage in one against the US... I can only believe that a nuke in their hands would lead to American deaths even if they have no intention of detonating it other than as a test or demonstration. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they DID detonate it.